HttpSession, Seam SessionContext and bijection

[sunfire]

Hi there,

I have a little issue with the understanding of how the HttpSession of a webcontainer and the seam SessionContext interact.
My Problem is that I set a HttpSession variable in a Filter with

session.setAttribute("loggedInUser", user);

this works finde since I can access the object from jsf with something like

#{loggedInUser.login}

Now I wanted to inject the variable into a seam component like this

@In(value="loggedInUser", scope=ScopeType.SESSION)
private User currentUser;

and it did not work but told me all the time that I needed a value for it.
Out of curiosity I changed it to this

@In(value="#{loggedInUser}", scope=ScopeType.SESSION)
private User currentUser;

and it worked.
Now I want to replace the object with a different one in the component and outject it back into the session context. and so I changed it again to

@In(value="#{loggedInUser}", scope=ScopeType.SESSION)
@Out(value="loggedInUser", scope=ScopeType.SESSION)
private User currentUser;

and now seam yells at me (for good reason I guess ;)) that a "Seam component hides managed bean with same name".
So since I obviously do something very wrong can you please tell me what the proper way would be to @In/@Out-ject something into the HttpSession context?

Thanks, Thorsten

[gavin.king]

Interesting problem.

There is a question I have been wrestling with about whether Seam should make its contextual data directly available in HttpSession and HttpRequest attributes with the same name as the context variable, or whether it should keep stuff separate as it does presently (as you can see).

I think your usecase is quite reasonable; we need to allow people to set up some variables in a servlet filter.

For now, a (very) hacky temporary workaround is to use:

session.setAttribute( ScopeType.SESSION.getPrefix() + '$' + "loggedInUser", user );

Please complain about this problem in JIRA, and I will give it some more thought. TIA

[sunfire]

Thanks alot for the quick response! I appreciate it very much! :)

http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/JBSEAM-138

[starksm64]

My view is that scope is an aspect that should not be explicitly encoded in an application. We need the jboss microcontainer metdata repository notion (http://wiki.jboss.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=JBoss5RepositoryClasses, http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&t=73653) woven throughout the jboss layers.

The potential point of conflict is whether use of a standard legacy accessor like HttpServletRequest.getParameter("user.home") should suddenly be treated as a heirarchical variable that can be overriden by an thread local aspect, as well as have a default value coming from less dynamic scopes (deployment configuration, system property, server defaults, admin domain defaults, etc.).

[muckwarrior]

I see from JIRA that this issue has been resolved.

Can somone tell me the correct way to make an object directly available to the Http Session so that it can be accessed by a Servlet filter?

Ive tried:

@Out(value="loggedInUser", scope=ScopeType.SESSION)
private User loggedInUser;

And in my servlet:

user = (User)req.getSession().getAttribute("loggedInUser");

...which returns null. Should this work?

[gavin.king]

Yes, this should work. (And I'm pretty sure it does. Step through Seam code in your debugger to confirm for yourself.)