sessions

Hi all,
Just a quick question on sessions. I am working on a site that adds a few different objects to the session. For example, User, Album and a few other values. What I want is for the session to expire only when the browser is closed and not if the user does not use the browser for say 15 min.
I have tried session.setMaxInactiveInterval(-1) but that does not seem to do it.
Anyone know how to do it?
Regards david

Have you tried using session-timeout tag in your web.xml.
If you set it with 0 it means that the session will never expire.

Hi
You can set session-timeout tag (web.xml) to a value to 0 or less
Thanks
Sainudheen

So if I edit the web.xml file so that the session tag is set to zero does this mean a session will only expire when the server is stopped?
What I am after is having the session expire when the browser is closed? Is this possible?
Regards
David

Sadly the browser does not tell the server when it closes. I don't think you can tell the difference between a)user closed the browser b)user went out for dinner & dancing or c)user is busily surfing other sites.
If you really, really gotta know (really!) you can put an applet in the browser and have it send "I'm still here!" messages to the server or have the server send "Are you still there?" messages to the applet. We're buying a vendor product that does this so it can synchronize telephony events and workflow availability with the browser. We're buying it because it ain't easy to build!

I don't think that "never expire" is what you want - if the servlet engine serializes sessions to disk, your hard drive will just accumulate sessions.
A "keep alive" pulse with JavaScript or applet sounds right for you - then you can let the servlet engine dispose of sessions normally.
Bill