Unable to retrieve attributes from Portlet Session which set in HttpSession

Question

I am trying to implement some captcha function, "/UP2/servlet/captch" is pointing to a servlet, which will generate a random captcha and store it in HttpSession, and I want to retrieve this later in WebSphere Portal custom portlet.

Here is my captcha image:

<img src="/UP2/servlet/captch" id="captch"/>

Here is servlet to generate captcha String and store in HttpSession

  protected void doGet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws IOException{
                //...
                request.getSession().setAttribute("key", capstr);
                //...
    }

When I submit the portlet, I want to retrieve the "key" from session, I use below code to retrieve:(The request here is PortletRequest(ActionRequest))

Object jCaptchainput = PortletUtils.getHttpServletRequest(request).getSession().getAttribute("key");

but I always get null This also not working:

Object jCaptchainput = request.getPortletSession().getAttribute("key", PortletSession.APPLICATION_SCOPE);

Can anyone help me out? Really want to know how to communicate between Servlet and Portlet in WebSphere Portal. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

is this for an authenticated users or unathenticated users? if unathenticated do you have anonymous sessions enabled? I believe you may be running into the below, you can also set it globally via Navigator service with public.session set to true http://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSYJ99_8.0.0/admin/srvcfgref_navigator.html

In this case, a temporary session is created and your session information will be lost in the next request. If you need to enable session tracking across requests for non-authenticated users, you can do so by setting the public.session parameter in the portal Navigator service configuration or by setting the com.ibm.portal.public.session container run time option in a JSR 286 portlet deployment descriptor. Note that this may result in significantly increased memory consumption. For details about the com.ibm.portal.public.session option and a code sample refer to the topic about Deployment descriptors, section about Container run time options. Instead of using these options, portlets that need to maintain interaction state even for non-authenticated users should use render parameters to keep this information instead of the portlet session, as recommended by the Java Portlet Specification.