Is your Oracle APEX session timing out?

Is your Oracle APEX session timing out?

6. March 2009

Oracle APEX, Security

You have upgraded to Oracle APEX 3.2 and are getting kicked out of your Oracle APEX Builder each time you are going back to your browser window after you have worked on something else for some time? For the last few days I had this problem quite often and it annoyed me a little bit. Being sure that this behavior is configurable, I asked Anthony Rayner during a chat where I can change that.

Instance Level

For the Oracle APEX Builder, you can find this setting on instance level.

  1. Connect with the workspace INTERNAL or use the
    URL http://<host name>:8080/apex/apex_admin
  2. Go to Manage Service\Security section Session Timeout for Oracle Application Express
  3. Change the properties Maximum Session Length in Seconds and Maximum Session Idle Time in Seconds to your needs
  4. You can also view the tutorial “Setting Application Express Idle and Session Timeout Defaults” for a step by step instruction.

Application Level

This Session Timeout settings are not just available for the APEX Development environment, you can also use them in your applications to make them more secure!

  1. Go to Shared Components\Application Definition\Security section Session Timeout
  2. The new section has several properties to define the session timeout behavior of your application.
    Session Timout setting for Oracle APEX application
  3. See the online tutorial “Setting an Application’s Idle and Session Timeout” for a step by step instruction.

This settings can also be set programatically during runtime. Have a look at the APEX_Util.set_session_lifetime_seconds and APEX_Util.set_session_max_idle_seconds procedures.

5 Responses to “Is your Oracle APEX session timing out?”

  1. Duncan Mein Says:
    March 6th, 2009 at 23:08

    Thanks for the warning Patrick. We are in the process of upgrading our Development and Test servers to 3.2 so I know this issue will crop up.

    Got to admit that I am pretty keen to expose this new feature in my apps as we have several ways of implementing this ranging from Custom Cookies to timestamps on the users table for every mouse click. Either way, using the built in feature will mean less PL/SQL to maintain!

    Duncs

  2. Flavio Says:
    March 7th, 2009 at 01:03

    Hi Patrick,
    this feature had almost passed unnoticed to me, thanks for bringing back my attention on it!

    Flavio

  3. Rudra Says:
    May 27th, 2009 at 07:38

    Hi,
    This is really an interesting website. I am impressed by APEX a lot.I am doing a live application using APEX, finding it very challenging and useful :-)

  4. Karl Says:
    March 14th, 2010 at 06:03

    Hi,

    I have an application with map (MapViewer). I would to have the user’s session idle time to be reset every time when user is dragging/zooming the map. Is there a built-in function/procedure that could use to achieve that behavior ?

    I do not want to follow http://atulley.wordpress.com/2008/04/02/implementing-session-timeout-in-your-apex-app/ because I do not want competition between the idle time in APEX and the one I am manging.

    Any idea ?

    Thanks
    Karl

  5. Patrick Wolf Says:
    March 15th, 2010 at 22:56

    Hi Karl,

    I think if you create an empty on-demand process and call it with an asynchronous AJAX call when you zoom, … This should reset the session timeout counter.

    Regards
    Patrick

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