Django session expiry?

Question

From django's documentation, I became under the impression that calling:

request.session.set_expiry(300)

from one view would cause the session to expire after five minutes inactivity; however, this is not the behavior that I'm experiencing in django trunk. If I call this method from one view, and browse around to other views that don't call the method, the session expires in five minutes. The behavior that I was expecting was a expire only after five minutes of inactivity and not simply failing to call set_expiry again before the expiry.

My question then is do I really need to call set_expiry in every view? If so, does there exist some decorator that may be of assistance? I can't imagine this isn't part of contrib.

Thanks, Pete

Answer 1

As the author of those methods, I can see that the documentation isn't very clear regarding this. Your observations are correct: only requests which cause the session to be altered is considered "activity".

You can use the SESSION_SAVE_EVERY_REQUEST setting to get the behavior you're after (at the obvious cost of the session having to being saved every request).