[wsia] Sessions and Transient Entities

[Eilon Reshef <eilon.reshef@webcollage.com>]

Title: Message

Mike,

 

Per your recent e-mails, I think that the approach makes sense.

 

The only thing that concerns me is that we have two different mechanisms to handle what would seem to be a very similar scenario.

 

Scenario 1: If there are two occurrences of a single portlet on a page, then as you described it the portlet is responsible for segregating the occurrence-specific information, using an additional key provided by the portal.

 

Scenario 2: If there are two occurrences of a pair of portlets, then suddenly the portal is responsible for segregating the two pairs by placing them in two separate sessions.

 

(All, of course, assuming that the portlets use sessions)

 

The idea of the Consumer creating and managing the segregation keys has the scalability advantage that you mentioned.

 

Can't we use it to handle both scenarios?

 

Namely:

 

In scenario 1, where there's portlets A1 and A2, then the portal sends a key "1" when displaying A1 and a key "2" when displaying A2.

In scenario 2, when there's portlet pairs <A1, B1> and <A2, B2>, then the portal sends a key "1" when displaying A1 and B1 and the key "2" when displaying A2 and B2.

 

This would allow the Producer to create and manage the session id (and maybe even create them only when needed, instead of explicitly creating them up-front as the current draft suggests). The Consumer only has to take into account that it may receive (and needs to re-send) a separate session id for each one of the keys.

 

Eilon