I have an issue that I can't think of a quick/easy solution for, when to close my session. If I use the ThreadLocal pattern, to close the session, I still have to explicitly call closeSession() correct? How can I close the session when the ThreadLocal dies? If I wrap the session and put close in the finalize, I am at the whim of the garbage collection, if I call closeSession at the end of a method that is inefficient since I might call X methods for every web transaction. I can't use the Filter pattern since I am in the middle of a refactoring...

Anyone got somethin?

You close the session just before your web transaction completes (i.e. if you're in a servlet, you close it before you send the response). It has nothing to do with the lifetime of the thread, only with the lifetime of the request handler.

In other words: when did you OPEN the session? Whenever the thing you were doing when you OPENED the session completes, that's when you should CLOSE the session. :-)

Cheers!
Rob

I can see your point to a degree, but I would like to write my Dao's / Store's as isolated objects since sometimes they are used in a command line app, othertimes in a Web app. Sometimes the JSP's call the Dao's directly (ugly, I know) and that stuff is being refactored out, but there is nothing I can do about it now.

I supposed there is nothing I can do until the refactoring is done. Thanks.

Matt Dowell

I don't understand the problem. You write the DAOs as objects that use the ThreadLocal Session. Then whoever is calling the DAOs is responsible for setting up and closing the Session for that thread.

In other words, you have:

So the DAOs have no idea who is calling them. All they know is they can get a ThreadLocalSession to do their job with.

I know this works since we have exactly the same pattern. We have DAOs that are used either in our beans or in our unit tests (i.e. our stand-alone JUnit classes). They work just fine in either place, getting their TLS from our singleton Persistence Hibernate-wrapper class.

Cheers
Rob

Oh, I see. Ya, if the JSPs call the DAOs directly, then that's pretty fubar. You could put session closes into your JSPs, but that's ugly.

Good thing you're refactoring :-)
Cheers!
Rob