[wsia] [wsrp-interfaces] Another case for explicit session creati on?

[Alan Kropp <akropp@epicentric.com>]

Not sure this went through the first time..

-----Original Message-----
From: Alan Kropp 
Sent: Tuesday, August 06, 2002 11:49 PM
To: 'wsia@lists.oasis-open.org '; 'wsrp-interfaces@lists.oasis-open.org
'
Subject: [wsia] [wsrp-interfaces] Another case for explicit session
creation?


I'd like to open another thread for the explicit session creation question.

In the standard portal situation, end users configure their own aggregate
views or "pages" of the available portlet services.  When an end user first
accesses their customized page, the portal needs to ask each of the portlets
on the page to render their markup, assembles the page, and then presents it
to the user.

Consider for the sake of argument that a theoretical page is composed of
five portlets, all of them remote portlets served by a single Producer.  The
portal has already created and configured the necessary entities.

In the portal startup case, the portal will send five individual requests to
this Producer, each of them targetted at a different entity.  As there are
no sessions in effect yet, the Producer in turn creates a session for each
entity, and passes back the handle in the individual getMarkup response.

It would be more efficient for the portal, however, if there was just one
session created by the Producer, grouping all of the entities into a single
session.  Otherwise, the portal must now map the end user's request scope,
which in the standard http case is a single http session, to multiple
Producer sessions, and it must be certain to put the correct session ID into
the performInteraction/getMarkup for each entity.  

The portal could explicitly request a Producer session ahead of any calls to
getMarkup, and pass this sessionID to getMarkup for all of that Producer's
entities.