Change session ID cookie name

Question

Is there a way in Tomcat to change the cookie name for the session ID at the application or the server level? Instead of having JSESSIONID, to change it to something else. If 2 Tomcat servers are running on the same machine and the user goes between the 2 servers in the same browser window (process), then the ID from Tomcat A's session gets overwritten with Tomcat B's session ID, so the original A session is lost when going back to A after having been at B.

Answer 1

URL rewriting and session cookies are two mutually exclusive ways of identifying the user.
What you want to do is find the current session of the user and use that one instead of creating a new session each time the user changes machines. This is a bit of a problem because each Tomcat server keeps a separate list of SessionIDs to compare to the user's SessionID.
You can kind of get around this problem by having the first server create a cookie that is visible to the entire domain, and then each server can fetch that particular cookie rather than looking for an explicit SessionID. For example...
Cookie cookie = new Cookie( "bsampieri.com", getUniqueString() );
cookie.setDomain( ".bsampieri.com" );
cookie.setMaxAge( -1 );
response.addCookie( cookie );And then each server checks for a cookie called "bsampieri.com", gets the identification string from that, and compares it with your list of "valid users" or shopping cart or whatever.