Stateful SessionBean - force passivation or removal

Question

Is there any way of forcing passivation or removal of stateful session beans
once their idle-timeout-seconds has been exceeded? Alternatively, can a
stateful session bean get notification of a client disconnection?
We have a special requirement for stateful session beans to hold a
transaction open over multiple calls (using bean-managed transactions),
which means keeping a connection open. Therefore, we have a connection as a
(transient) member variable, and when the bean is passivated or removed, the
transaction is rolled back and the connection is closed... OK, so far no
problem. However, during this transaction, the session bean maintains a lock
on part of the database preventing others from interfering with the updates.
A problem arises if the client crashes or is disconnected somehow, as the
session bean still remains active, only becoming eligible for passivation or
removal after it's idle timeout has expired.Unfortunately, even when the
idle timeout expires, the session bean is not passivated or removed, even if
the max number of beans in the cache is exceeded... In fact, there is no
guarantee it will ever be passivated or removed unless the server runs short
of memory.
We would like to be able to force passivation or removal of stateful session
beans whose idle timeout has expired or where the client has disconnected.
Any ideas?
Dave

Answer 1

Thanks for the suggestion Barry, but since we are using a client application
that creates the SSB directly, there's no servlet or intermediate
server-side bean to implement HttpSessionBindingListener. I'll check, but
I'm pretty sure the SSB can't implement it itself. Still, it's food for
thought...
Cheers,
Dave
"Barry Munro" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]..
On 03 Dec 2001, Dave Lorde wrote:
We would like to be able to force passivation or removal of stateful
session beans whose idle timeout has expired or where the client has
disconnected. Any ideas?To remove them when your user session expires you could use
javax.servlet.http.HttpSessionBindingListener so that you are informedwhen
the user's session is unbound from the session. Then you could call the
remove method of your stateful session bean which calls the ejbRemove
method on the SSB.
Barry