Hi,

I dont understand "current_session_context_class".The configuration file contains value "thread" for this.Can anybody please explain me the meaning of this in simple terms.

regads,
Ajse

Hi,

When you create a hibernate session using any of the sessionFactory.openSession(...) methods the session factory will 'bind' the session to the current context. The default context is 'thread' which means the sesion factory will bind the session to the thread from which openSession(...) is called.

This is useful because you can later call sessionFactory.getCurrentSession() which will return the session that is bound to the currently running thread.

You can use other predefined current_session_context_class values such as 'jta' which will bind the session to the currently running JTA transaction (if you're running in an application server that supports JTA this is really useful). Or you can write your own implementation of org.hibernate.context.CurrentSessionContext and use that implementation to manage the current session context (not really advisable unless you absolutely need to).

Neil

Hi,
Thanks for your reply.One thing more.Which thread currently we are talking about?

Suppose a user clicks on three buttons one by one and i have three different DAO classes for that and in each DAO class i have to just call session.getCurrentSession() and proceed?

How does hibernate decide that its a same user which is requesting?Does it utilise HTTPSession for this?Please answer this.

regards,
Ajse

I assume you're talking about a web application here in which case each new HTTP request runs in its own new thread (this is not exactly true if your web container uses thread pooling but for the purposes of this explaination each new HTTP request runs in its own new thread).

If each button click in your app creates a new HTTP request then each button click will run in its own separate thread. This means that if you open a session in one request then the session will be bound to the thread for that request. You can reuse the session in that request by calling sessionFactory.getCurrentSession() but you cannot do this for the other requests because they are running in different threads.

Hibernate has no understanding of the HTTP session and doesn't use it for anything - it's just an ORM tool - you need to write all the code to manage your users etc.

The simple way round this is to use the open-session-in-view pattern described in the Hibernate documentation (DON'T put your Hibernate session in your HTTP session - this seems like a good idea at first but is actually VERY BAD).

Neil

Let me describe it to see if i have understood it completely.
If there are multiple DAO calls in a single request then session.getCurrentSession() is useful.But if there is only single DAO call per request then session.openSession() is the right way.
Am i correct?

regards,
Ajse

Yes that is correct.



Yes and no. But mainly no. Typically, you shouldn't open and close sessions in your DAO classes because they don't know if other DAOs are going to need the same sessions. The best thing to do is open a session for each incoming request (using a filter is the easiest way to do this) and then calling sessionFactory.getCurrentSession() in all your DAOs to get the current session. That way all your DAOs will be easily reusable.

This is the open-session-in-view pattern and is definitely the way forward here. You can find documentation at http://www.hibernate.org/43.html. Opening a session is a very cheap operation (and doesn't necessarily need to obtain a database connection) so opening a session for each incoming request is a minimal performance hit.

Neil

Thanks njr28 for your comments.It was really helpful.

Ajse