Title: Message
If a simple group-id within the portlet UI
takes care of the issue (which I agree with), why bother to allow the Consumer
to create and manage sessions explicitly (versus implicit creation by the
Producer)?
-----Original Message-----
From:
Michael Freedman [mailto:]
Sent: Tuesday,
June 11, 2002 7:43 PM
To: ;
Subject: Re: [wsrp] Sessions and Transient
Entities
Eilon,
I think your
suggestion intermixes 2 different concepts -- that of session identity and
that of instance/entity identity. My scenario 1 concerns itself with how
an instance/entity id can be used to segment data within a session. My
scenario 2 concerns itself with how distinct sessions can be
established/maintained. I suggested we don't define a way for the
producer to describe its grouping rules. Rather a consumer can choose to
support grouping (via a mechanism its free to define) or leave it up to the
consumer to handle internally (via perference/configuration data). So in
my scenario 2, a consumer isn't responsible for separating the portlets into
different sessions. It merely is allowed to do so. Portlets must
assume they aren't running in such environments -- rather they must assume
they run in a shared session world -- hence they need an ID to do the proper
namespacing. As the consumer doesn't know this grouping (because it
doesn't implement grouping) the producer must provide its own UI for getting
these keys -- i.e. the producer must provide a configuration/personalization
UI that allows a group key to be specified for each of its portlets -- it can
then use this "internal" group id to key/separate data in the shared session.
Just a long way of saying -- I don't buy your scenario 2. If the
consumer knows the grouping, I would rather the consumer maintain 2 discrete
sessions as this allows it to continue to pass the entity id so each entity
can maintain entity specific data if necessary (i.e. portlet A, B, B' in the
same session/group -- B and B' can keep their data separate). If the
consumer doesn't know the grouping then it controls things just like scenario
1. The producer is free to define/manage finer granularity as described
above.
-Mike-
Eilon Reshef wrote:
Mike,Per your recent e-mails, I think that the
approach makes sense.The only thing that concerns me is that we
have two different mechanisms to handle what would seem to be a very similar
scenario.Scenario 1:
If there are two occurrences of a single portlet on a page, then as
you described it the portlet is responsible for segregating the
occurrence-specific information, using an additional key provided by the
portal.Scenario 2:
If there are two occurrences of a pair of portlets, then suddenly the
portal is responsible for segregating the two pairs by placing them in two
separate sessions.(All, of course, assuming that the
portlets use sessions)The idea of the Consumer creating and
managing the segregation keys has the
scalability advantage that you mentioned.Can't we use it to handle both
scenarios?Namely:In scenario 1, where there's portlets A1
and A2, then the portal sends a key "1" when displaying A1 and a key "2"
when displaying A2. In scenario 2, when there's portlet pairs
<A1, B1> and <A2, B2>, then the portal sends a key "1" when
displaying A1 and B1 and the key "2" when displaying A2 and
B2.This would
allow the Producer to create and manage the session id (and maybe even
create them only when needed, instead of explicitly creating them up-front
as the current draft suggests). The Consumer only has to take into account
that it may receive (and needs to re-send) a separate session id for each
one of the keys.Eilon
