Is it possible to maintain different sessions (users) in different window tabs using Spring 2.5?

Question

We have a requirement where support for different users in different tabs of a browser window. How can we achieve this in Spring 2.5? The application is based on Users, where users will have their own agents and articles. An internal user should be able to login to different user accounts in different tabs at same time and manipulate their data. Any help is much appreciated.

Answer 1

Generally speaking, no, because all of the tabs within the browser window share the same cookies.

One way to do it would be use multiple domain names all pointing at the same app. Each domain name would have its own set of cookies. You would need to have some way of switching to a new domain name after you open a new tab.

How about, have a set of bookmark toolbar bookmarks, each corresponding to a different domain name. Control-click on the bookmark and it opens in a new tab. You could provide the users links in your navigation to the different domains that they can drag onto their toolbar.

Depending on what browsers your users are using you could get even slicker - in some browsers Javascript window.open() opens a new tab. You could have the JS compute the new domain name before the window.open().

Answer 2

A browser's cookie store does not distinguish between different windows or tabs when deciding what cookies to send. So a cookie based approach won't help.

My suggestion for an alternative would be to have a hidden "userName" parameter that is passed back and forth as a URL query parameter for all requests from a given tab or window. You could finesse the setting of the parameter in browser requests by using some Javascript to add a hidden parameter to each of the HTML forms in the page just loaded. The parameter value would be snarffed from the query string of the current page URL. You'd just need to make sure that all pages included stuff in the header to load the JS and run it when the page load completed.