[Catalyst] "You have been automatically logged out."

[Nilson Santos Figueiredo Junior]

On 2/21/07, Jonathan Rockway <jon at jrock.us> wrote:
> The idea is to let the user know why their action failed, not to pop up
> messages saying "something might fail in the future!"  Plus it's easier
> to implement, and works with every browser.

I've been a victim of web applications designed like this for several
times. It all seems like a good idea until you spend a long time
filling a form or writing a piece of text only to find out that you've
been logged out and your last 10 minutes were suddenly trashed.

If you're *only* using server-side checks be sure to never drop user
submitted data when their session has timed out otherwise it might
become a major PITA for your users.

Of course you shouldn't rely on JavaScript for actually timing out the
sessions, but your users will surely appreciate it if they get a
warning when their sessions time out. This could be implemented using
a JavaScript time out. When it expires, there's a good chance that the
user's session has expired. If you want to be sure, make an
asynchronous call back to the server. Users without JavaScript will
just get the default behaviour (i.e. no warnings).

-Nilson Santos F. Jr.