How to detect browser closing?

Question

In my web app, when a user logs in, I add his Id to a vector of valid Ids in the servlet, when he logs out, I remove his Id from the vector, so I can see how many current us

Answer 1

in JavaScript you can use the onbeforeclose event to pass a call back to the server when the user closes the browser.

I typically use a synchronous Ajax call to do this.

Answer 2

I had to do that recently, and after some searches, I found some solutions on the Net... all of them non working universally!

onbeforeclose and onclose events are used for this task. But there are two catches: they are fired when the user reload the page or even just change the current page. There are tricks to see if the event is actually a window/page/tab closing (looking at some Dom properties going haywire on closing event), but:

• They are browser dependent
• The tricks are undocumented, thus brittle
• And actually they vary along the browser version/update...

And worst of all, these events are now ignored by most modern browsers, because they have been abused by rogue ads popping out windows when browser was closing. They are not fired in Safari, Opera, IE7, etc.

As pointed out, most Web applications with login destroy the user session after a while, eg. half an hour. I was asked to logout on browser closing to free faster a precious resource: licenses. Because users often forget to log out...

The solution I gave was to ping with an Ajax request (sending the user ID) the server on regular intervals (say 1 minute). If the server receives no ping for, say, 3 minutes, it disconnect the user.

Answer 3

Here is a dirty way to accomplish "detecting a browser close" I found this in a forum somewhere on this site, when I find it again I will link to it.

Add additional headers to the http response. When additional requests come in they will contain these additional headers. You can check for these headers and if they aren't present you can kill the session, so a new one will start. While this doesn't "notify" you if the browser is closed it can tell you if someone has closed their window and is attempting to come back, since the headers you added will be missing.

 wrapper.setHeader("Cache-Control", "no-cache, no-store, must-     revalidate");
 wrapper.setHeader("Pragma", "no-cache");
 wrapper.setDateHeader("Expires", 0);

 Where wrapper is a response wrapper.

 if (wrapper.getHeaderNames().size() < the number of headers you are expecting)
 request.getSession().invalidate();

 Not perfect but it might help someone.

Answer 4

There is no way to know on the server-side (unless you are using some JavaScript to send a message to the server) that the browser has closed. How could there be? Think of how HTTP works - everything is request and response.

However, the application server will track when Sessions are active and will even tell you when a Session has been destroyed (such as due to time-out). Take a look at this page to see how to configure a HttpSessionListener to receive these events. Then you can simply keep track of the number of active sessions.

The number of active sessions will lag behind the actual number of current users, since some period of (configurable) time has to elapse before a session is timed out; however, this should be somewhat close (you can lower the session-timeout to increase the accuracy) and it is a lot cleaner and easier than 1) tracking Sessions yourself or 2) sending some asynchronous JavaScript to the server when a browser is closed (which is not guaranteed to be sent).

Answer 5

There is no foolproof way to do what you're trying to do, but both sblundy and Diodeus have plans that will cover most circumstances. There is nothing you can do about someone who turns off Javascript in their browser, or their internet connection goes down, or their power goes out. You should just cull sessions after a certain period of inactivity (which I think is what sblundy's suggestion of listening for session destruction will do).

Answer 6

I suggest you remove the ID when the Servlet engine destroys the session. Register a HttpSessionListener that removes the user's ID when sessionDestroyed() is called.

Diodeus's idea will only help you detect that the session is over more immediately.