Question

I’m looking to warn the user when his or her session times out (I’m having weird timeout problems) and I found the following code:

<% 
advanceWarning = 2 
jsTimeout = (session.timeout - advanceWarning) * 60000 
%> 
<script> 
window.setTimeout("alert('Session is about to expire');",<%=jsTimeout%>); 
</script>

Is this reliable?

Answer 1

Well, it will catch the case where the session times out on the server, assuming no other requests used session in the mean time, and the cookie doesn’t expire.

So if you call a web service method or something that uses session, the session time out will be reset and you will have to catch that separately. And if your session cookie expiry (assuming you’re doing it that way) is less than your timeout, then session may be lost then too.