Selectively prevent Session from being created

Question

In my app, I have an external monitor that pings the app ever few minutes and measures its uptime / response time Every time the monitor connects, a new server session is created, so when I look at the number of sessions, it's always a minimum of 15, even during times where there are no actual users.

I tried to address this with putting the session creation code into a filter, but that doesn't seem to do it - I guess session automatically gets created when the user opens the first page?

all() { before = { if (actionName=='signin') { def session = request.session //creates session if not exists } } }

I can configure the monitor to pass in a paramter if I need to (i.e. http://servername.com/?nosession, but not sure how to make sure the session isn't created.

Answer 1

Right now there is nothing you can do to prevent the session creation. See: http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GRAILS-1238

Fortunately, until you are hitting high numbers of requests per second, this isn't a huge problem. One thing we did to get around the false data in our "currently active users" report, was to log the sessions to the database. We create a session record only when the user logs in. Then on specifically mapped URLs, we will "touch" that session record to update the last accessed time. The session record keeps track of user agent, IP, etc and is useful for many reasons. Doing something like this would get around the bogus session count.