JSF: How to invalidate an user session when he logs twice with the same credentials

Question

I'm using JSF 1.2 with Richfaces and Facelets.

I have an application with many session-scoped beans and some application beans.

The user logs in with, let's say, Firefox. A session is created with ID="A"; Then he opens Chrome and logs in again with the same credentials. A session is created with ID="B".

When the session "B" is created, I want to be able to destroy session "A". How to do that?

Also. when the user in Firefox does anything, I want to be able to display a popup or some kind of notification saying "You have been logged out because you have logged in from somewhere else".

I have a sessionListener who keeps track of the sessions created and destroyed. The thing is, I could save the HTTPSession object in a application-scoped bean and destroy it when I detect that the user has logged in twice. But something tells me that is just wrong and won't work.

Does JSF keep track of the sessions somewhere on the server side? How to access them by identifier? If not, how to kick out the first log in of an user when he logs in twice?

Answer 1

1. create an integer field in the databse userLoggedInCount
2. On each login increment that flag and store the result in the session.
3. On each request check the value in the database and the one in the session, and if the one in the session is less than the one in the DB, invalidate() the session and decrement the value in the database
4. whenever a session is destroyed decrement the value as well.

Answer 2

The normal DB-independent approach would be to let the User have a static Map<User, HttpSession> variable and implement HttpSessionBindingListener (and Object#equals() and Object#hashCode()). This way your webapp will still function after an unforeseen crash which may cause that the DB values don't get updated (you can of course create a ServletContextListener which resets the DB on webapp startup, but that's only more and more work).

Here's how the User should look like:

public class User implements HttpSessionBindingListener {

    // All logins.
    private static Map<User, HttpSession> logins = new HashMap<User, HttpSession>();

    // Normal properties.
    private Long id;
    private String username;
    // Etc.. Of course with public getters+setters.

    @Override
    public boolean equals(Object other) {
        return (other instanceof User) && (id != null) ? id.equals(((User) other).id) : (other == this);
    }

    @Override
    public int hashCode() {
        return (id != null) ? (this.getClass().hashCode() + id.hashCode()) : super.hashCode();
    }

    @Override
    public void valueBound(HttpSessionBindingEvent event) {
        HttpSession session = logins.remove(this);
        if (session != null) {
            session.invalidate();
        }
        logins.put(this, event.getSession());
    }

    @Override
    public void valueUnbound(HttpSessionBindingEvent event) {
        logins.remove(this);
    }

}

When you login the User as follows:

User user = userDAO.find(username, password);
if (user != null) {
    sessionMap.put("user", user);
} else {
    // Show error.
}

then it will invoke the valueBound() which will remove any previously logged in user from the logins map and invalidate the session.

When you logout the User as follows:

sessionMap.remove("user");

or when the session is timed out, then the valueUnbound() will be invoked which removes the user from the logins map.