Images disappear after a while

[chellegaard]

The timeframe is quite irregular (sometimes a few minutes - sometimes several hours), but if a user is logged into our smartGWT application over a longer period of time, sooner or later the UI-components degenerate, because previously unused images are not loaded.

This happens for both smartGWT skin images and our own images (and actually also css files). It's particular apparent with the mouse over images of the smartGWT skins...after a while these are not available to the browser it seems.

We suspect the session timeouts and lazy loading of additional images are no longer possible. But this doesn't correspond with the fact that the user may still access other new tabs or other functionality...all that's missing are the images!! Or maybe the caching settings in the browser, app server or http headers are responsible?!?!

We are currently running the application on a Tomcat6 with a Spring 3.0 backend on a Windows 2003 server and the behaviour is the same in both chrome, ie, firefox.

[Isomorphic]

Opening a new tab is a client-side operation that doesn't contact the server. While the session is timed out, the user will be able to interact with the app until the first data request.

To avoid the problem with images, don't protect the images with the authentication system. Smart GWT skin images are not confidential. Also, you seem to have incorrect cache settings if you are seeing previously fetched images disappear - you need to be using the Expires HTTP header to advertise that images may be cached.

Finally, see the Relogin chapter in the docs package for the best way to handle requests for data when the session is timed out.