Ajax – Session timeout and ViewExpiredException handling on JSF/PrimeFaces ajax request

ajaxjsf-2primefacessession-timeoutviewexpiredexception

I find this article to be useful for non-ajax request How to handle session expiration and ViewExpiredException in JSF 2?
but I can't make use of this when I am submitting using an AJAX call.

Suppose in a primefaces dialog, I am making a post request using AJAX and session has already timed out.
I see my page getting stuck.

How to fix this kind of scenario such that when I post using AJAX, I could redirect him to my view expired page and
then forward him to the login page similar to the solution in the link above?

JSF2/Primefaces/Glassfish

Best Answer

Exceptions which are thrown during ajax requests have by default totally no feedback in the client side. Only when you run Mojarra with project stage set to Development and use <f:ajax>, then you will get a bare JavaScript alert with the exception type and message. But other than that, and in PrimeFaces, there's by default no feedback at all. You can however see the exception in the server log and in the ajax response (in the webbrowser's developer toolset's "Network" section).

You need to implement a custom ExceptionHandler which does basically the following job when there's a ViewExpiredException in the queue:

String errorPageLocation = "/WEB-INF/errorpages/expired.xhtml";
context.setViewRoot(context.getApplication().getViewHandler().createView(context, errorPageLocation));
context.getPartialViewContext().setRenderAll(true);
context.renderResponse();

Alternatively, you could use the JSF utility library OmniFaces. It has a FullAjaxExceptionHandler for exactly this purpose (source code here, showcase demo here).

beforecreate: function (node, targetNode, type, to) {
    jQuery.ajax({
        url: 'http://example.com/catalog/create/' + targetNode.id + '?name=' + encode(to.inp[0].value),
        success: function (result) {
            if (result.isOk == false) alert(result.message);
        },
        async: false
    });
}

Javascript – How to manage a redirect request after a jQuery Ajax call

I read this question and implemented the approach that has been stated regarding setting the response HTTP status code to 278 in order to avoid the browser transparently handling the redirects. Even though this worked, I was a little dissatisfied as it is a bit of a hack.

After more digging around, I ditched this approach and used JSON. In this case, all responses to AJAX requests have the status code 200 and the body of the response contains a JSON object that is constructed on the server. The JavaScript on the client can then use the JSON object to decide what it needs to do.

I had a similar problem to yours. I perform an AJAX request that has 2 possible responses: one that redirects the browser to a new page and one that replaces an existing HTML form on the current page with a new one. The jQuery code to do this looks something like:

$.ajax({
    type: "POST",
    url: reqUrl,
    data: reqBody,
    dataType: "json",
    success: function(data, textStatus) {
        if (data.redirect) {
            // data.redirect contains the string URL to redirect to
            window.location.href = data.redirect;
        } else {
            // data.form contains the HTML for the replacement form
            $("#myform").replaceWith(data.form);
        }
    }
});

The JSON object "data" is constructed on the server to have 2 members: data.redirect and data.form. I found this approach to be much better.

Ajax – Session timeout and ViewExpiredException handling on JSF/PrimeFaces ajax request

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