The SAP Enterprise Portal offers a mechanism called Session Release Notification. This feature is used by SAP applications running inside the portal to close their sessions in case the user closes the browser window, navigates away from the application or logs-off from the SAP Portal. This SAP standard how-to guide explains what you must do to accomplish this mechanism for your own custom developed applications integrated into the portal.

This how-to coveres the following Netweaver releases:

• SAP Netweaver 7.0
• SAP Netweaver Composition Environment 7.1 and 7.2

SAP describes this how-to guide’s Business Scenario as following:

One reason to use the SAP Enterprise Portal is the easy integration of state full (existing) Web Applications into the Portal.
When integrating state-full applications you always face the problem, that the application is not notified if the user navigates away or even closes the browser window. All Web Applications face this problem, since they are based on the stateless HTTP protocol. Nearly all state full applications keep session data on the server side and release those resources after a predefined timeout. The servlet container for example releases session data by default after 30 minutes inactivity. As a consequence there is a delay between the user action (e.g. the user has closed the browser) and the release of the corresponding session data on the server side.

This delay can cause the following problems:

• “Dead State” remains on the server and blocks resources (memory) until timeout.
• Server scalability and performance get worse due to the load which is caused by this “Death State”
• Application locks may lead to deadlocks, when the same or different users accessing the same shared resources.

If you use SAP technology to build your Web Applications and run them in the portal, they automatically include a feature called Session Release Notification, which informs the external content server if the user

• navigates away
• closes the browser window
• logs-off the portal

The following SAP technologies use this Session Release Notification out of the box without the need to do/implement anything.

• ITS based applications
• BSP (Business Server Pages)
• Web Dynpro (ABAP and Java)

However if you have build your applications using non SAP technologies, your content server will not get notified automatically.

This How-to guide shows how you integrate external applications into the portal which will be notified when the user navigates away closes the browser or logs-off the portal.

Get it in PDF, just click on the download link below.