Why does message keep asking user to "extend their session" even shortly after entering records ?

[gilbertro]

I am seeing this happen to my Alpha apps quite often :

A user would be doing data entry consistently and now and then a message box will popup asking them if they want to extend the session since it soon will expire.

It makes sense if it pops up after being idle for a while but that is not the case.

Does anyone have an idea to why this would be happening ? I suspect it may be a setting in Alpha App server that I am not understanding ?
What setting controls this ?

Please help. Users are complaining

[JerryBrightbill]

Re: Why does message keep asking user to "extend their session" even shortly after entering records ?

A session is only extended when they make a request to the server. It is entirely possible for a user to be entering data for quite some time on the local browser without making any request to the server.

[mikeallenbrown]

Re: Why does message keep asking user to "extend their session" even shortly after entering records ?

Robert, like Jerry says in order to extend a session there needs to be a server call back. I use the below code to do this in an xbasic function...

function extendSession as c (e as p)
	
	'This doesn't do anything except extend the user's session.
	
end function

Then in an onBlur event I have this JS code: {dialog.object}.ajaxCallback('','','extendSession','','');

You can place that onBlur JS in any fields you want. I place a dozen or so around my longer data entry forms that my clients use.

[gilbertro]

Re: Why does message keep asking user to "extend their session" even shortly after entering records ?

Thanks much Jerry and Mike (great tip)
Makes sense.
I always thought saving a record would extend session

[mikeallenbrown]

Re: Why does message keep asking user to "extend their session" even shortly after entering records ?

Saving a record will extend the session. Are you implying that even after saving records the session timeout warning appears? I don't see how that's could happen. Is this an offline app?

In each UX there is a property you can set on how you handle session timeouts. Your app server also has a setting for this: Lease Lifetime in the Advanced tab. I set mine to 15 minutes.

[gilbertro]

Re: Why does message keep asking user to "extend their session" even shortly after entering records ?

It is not an offline app.

So Lease Lifetime setting specifies how much more time is extended/added to the session when the user chooses to extend the session ?

Well now that I know it is tied to the Lease Lifetime setting, I will check that. Maybe for the particular setup it i shorter than I think.
Thanks

[kingcarol]

Re: Why does message keep asking user to "extend their session" even shortly after entering records ?

I know this is an old thread, but I have a question that may, or may not, relate. I moved from using buttons to open components in modal pop up windows TO using expanding menus and running javascript actions to open the pop up windows instead. Ever since then, my users started getting session timeout warnings WHILE they were working in a pop up window, which had not been happening before. The expanding menus are on a tabbed ui, as were the buttons before. So.... my question is... does clicking a button cause a behind-the-scenes callback somehow, that extends the session?

To keep session alive, my users end up closing pop up and going back to tabbed ui to do some action in a component that is opened in a tab...