What is a QlikView session?

[Fredrik_Lautrup]

This is not easy to answer, so let me walk you through the flow in QlikView and talk about the life of the different sessions in QlikView.

Let’s start at the browser. The most common way of maintaining a session in the web layer is session cookies. Session cookies is a small set of information that the browser will send with every request in a session. Session cookies is also what QlikView uses to maintain the web layer sessions. So once authenticated, QlikView knows who you are and will assign a random set of characters, stored in a session cookie in the browser, to identify your future requests to QlikView.

The session cookie will identify your requests until you either log out or your session times out from inactivity.

The web session is the first session you will encounter using QlikView. The second session is the QlikView server session.

So what is a QlikView server session? Think of the QlikView server session as the place where QlikView keeps track of what you are doing in a document. The session is identified by a user’s access to one document. As you click in the document, your state will be recorded in the session. Your session is maintained in memory while you are active in the document and a bit longer. When a QlikView server session times out, the state is written to disc. If you come back to the same document later you can continue exploring at the same place you left off.

So when are the different sessions used?

If you use the AJAX client, both sessions are used. If you lose your web session you will have to re-authenticate to get a new session and if the QlikView server session times out you will have to reconnect.

If you use the thick client or the plugin, these talk directly to the QlikView server and therefore only use QlikView Server sessions.

The timeouts can be configured: the timeout configuration you do in the QMC is related to the QlikView Session; whereas the timeout values for the web session only are configurable in the local configuration file for the web server.

So now you know how sessions are used in QlikView. Even though this is not directly related to security, it will help you understand concepts like load balancing, web tickets and authentication in QlikView.

I hope you found this information useful, if you have any other subjects related to security that you like me to write about please leave a comment.

[Greg_Williams]

Helpful. Thank you.

[#3]

Nice post. Seems that the dimension cycle state is also recorded in the session, Is there any way to start at the first cycle defined dimension when the user come back in the document ? Thanks.

[pablolabbe]

A user can remove the last saved state of the application. To do this:

- In Qlikview 10, click the down arrow at right upper corner of the app icon, them click "Remove last document state" hyperlink.

- In Qlikview 11, click "view detail" at bottom of app icon, them click "Remove last document state" button.

Best Regards,

Pablo

[#5]

Is there a way to remove a users last saved state from the QMC? or is there some settings in the configuration file to "auto remove" the last document state after a specific time of inactivity?

[sudeepkm]

nice and very useful info.

[sudeepkm]

I have few questions. Kindly help me understand.

1. Is there a Document Session created by the Server? Deciding how long the document should be in the memory irrespective or the fact whether currently used by a user or not.

2. I've seen a button/link "Close" when I open any document on Access Point. When I click on "Close" is it going to close my session? It looks like this action "Close document" is document specific. Does QlikView  creates User-Document Session or its just one session per Server and using that we can access any document on the Access Point.

[Fredrik_Lautrup]

The document session is created on the server for a user on a document and at least for the time you have sessions the document will be in memory. After that there is a timeout value before the app is cleared from memory.

And yes, if you press close the session is closed.

[mr_barriesmith]

I like that idea of auto-remove recovery state after a time. Currently session recovery is on or off.  You should add an idea on this and get it voted up.

[umerikhlas]

Very Helpful..

[datanibbler]

Hi,

just a general comment - not specifically related to your document.

I must admit I just flew over the document - one important info that I am always looking for in documents is "Why you should know this" - when time to spend reading up is rare, then it's always important to know whether it's worthwhile spending the time.

(in your document, I just found this info, more by chance, in the second-to-last sentence - it should be in the very first)

Best regards,

DataNibbler