Method for keeping a web session alive in a web application

Abstract

There is a need for an improved method to keep a web session in a web application alive for a determinable amout of time allowing to keep a limited amount of data on the Internet Information Server and manage individually the session timeout characteriscs of the web session in the web application. These objectives are achieved according to a method for keeping a web session alive in a web application, comprising the steps of: a) providing a software tool that offers at least one software-coded mechanism to keep the web session alive; said software tool comprising a class library that comprises a first part that manages a specific portion of code to be added to a web page of said web application and a second part that manages the responses to requests from a web server that is deriving from the portion of code added to the web page; b) at engineering level during the development of a page of the web application, using the class library to assign the desired software-coded mechanism to the web page of the web application, wherein said assignment adds the respective specific portion of code to the web page of said web application; c) at runtime of the web application, executing the specific portion of code added in order to answer the requests from a web server in the dependency of the desired mechanism. This method therefore allows to automaticall refresh the web pages in the background behind without any further user interaction. Thereby, the portion of code added effectively creates a hidden postback that keeps alive the session's state. By means of the class library, the user is enabled at engineering level to manage the session timeout state and to eliminate a premature timeout thereby eliminating any risk of possible data loss.

Description

Technical field [0001] The present invention relates to a method for keeping a network session alive in a network application. Background technique [0002] The present invention can be considered to be based on modern manufacturing processes. These manufacturing processes are highly automated and can be divided into several hierarchical layers. For example, at the highest level, enterprise resource planning (ERP) is executed, which can be referred to as the business layer. At a lower level, hardware implementation and control are performed, which can be called various control levels. The industry standard ISA S95 defines the middle layer, which integrates and links the business and control layers. This middle layer is called the Manufacturing Execution System (MES), which defines the MES process based on the data and interaction between various functions, such as production modeling, production scheduling, resource management, resource allocation, scheduling, data collection ...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

However, in practice there are two main difficulties with this option

The first problem is that setting an arbitrary timeout value greater than one hour will cause too much memory to be kept on the server (such as the Internet Information Server), where the web application is hosted, holding all the sessions for thousands of user sessions data

The second problem is that it is possible to run into testing web applications where typically the timeout for a web application will not exceed an hour or even be greater than an hour

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