Question

I am using forms authentication, and have a timeout of 30 minutes.

What I am looking for is some way of prompting the user with a few minutes to go that they are about to be timed out, and if they want to keep their session alive.

We have some fairly large forms with the users filling in a lot of data. They’ll have been checking others systems for info, cross checking with colleagues on the phone, etc.

I also want to add an auto-save just before they are timed out as well.

Are these easy things to achieve with JQuery for example?

Answer 1

The solution we found on our project was to create a javascript (not necessarily jQuery) which prompts the user before they’re logged out, and sends a bogus httpRequest in order to keep the session alive.
our script was something like (untested):

var promptUserTimeoutId = 0;
promptUserTimeoutId = setTimeout(promptUser, 30 * 60 * 1000); //call just once, in 30 minutes

function promptUser() {
  if (alert('stay logged in?')) {
       sendHttpRequest(); //just signal a keep-alive to the server...
       //re-set the 30 minutes count
       clearTimeout(promptUserTimeoutId);
       promptUserTimeoutId = setTimeout(promptUser, 30 * 60 * 1000);
  }
}