Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Multiple Sessions/LogonId in Commerce 6.0 ? not supported OOB

Authentication framework in Commerce:
The current WCS 6.0 implementation supports a single session at any given time for a user and when you try to login from a different browser/Device using the same loginId. It kills the other active session.

Details:
Essentially the context of a user in WCS is handled by a serviced called Business Context Services, essentially it folds into the Business context engine which controls the behavior of the business components over the lifetime of a session.
It uses a couple of tables CTXDATA and CTXMGMT, to manage the context. Essentially each time a user comes to the site, a new activity is created in CTXMGMT and
it associates the calling user (Users_id as CALLER_ID) with an ACTIVITY_ID . The ACTIVITY_ID remains the same in the course of the session and it also keeps all the contexts associated with the activity in CTXDATA table.

When the same user logs in from a different device or a separate browser, essentially the previous context in CTXMGMT is marked as T (Terminated). It creates a new activity with a state A (Active).

Out of the box this is the behavior and I don’t know if commerce provides any API to customize multiple activities active. I know from my past experience, whenever a user has multiple activities active due to any discrepancies, he cannot login into the site at all and gets a business context exception. I can think of a customization to manage activities outside of business context and mapping them to the same user.

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wchelp/v6r0m0/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.commerce.developer.doc/concepts/csdbcsbcm.htm

4 comments:

  1. Hi Raj,

    Did you find any way to customize this single user behaviour in WCS?

    I mean is there any way to customize wcs so that we can have multiple session for same user.

    Thanks,
    Anuj

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Raj,
    Any idea if parallel execution is still not possible in wcs? Has this been overridden. If so what are the issues faced. I have a requirement to enable parallel login for same userid and wanted to know the best practises.

    Thanks
    Hari

    ReplyDelete
  3. FYI, commerce has provided a APAR for this

    http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg1JR45670. This is not included in any feature/fix packs but available from support;
    http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/wchelp/v7r0m0/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.ibm.commerce.install.doc%2Frefs%2Frig_new_and_changed_support.htm

    ReplyDelete
  4. FP8 customers can just follow this
    http://www-01.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSZLC2_7.0.0/com.ibm.commerce.admin.doc/tasks/tsemultilogonsessions.htm

    ReplyDelete