Expert Assistance on Persisting Web Flow State to DB and Retrieve Back

[Yogendra Joshi]

Hi Friends,

I have recently started evaluating Spring Web Flow for our legacy MVC application and one of the most important requirements for us, is to be able to maintain state across requests. No. I am not talking about HttpSession state or maintaining state whilst the user is in the application, but rather saving the state of the flow in database and then being able to return to the flow which the user last visited before being logged out. I have tried locating sample applications on the Spring Git page but unable to find anything related to the requirement we have.

So here is the sequence of steps we want to achieve:

1. User logs in to the application, Navigates to Screen A->Screen B->Screen C and then gets distracted due to some work and does not navigate to Screen D. After a while user gets logged out.
2. User Re-Logs in to the application, there is a option like "Goto to the last visited page for this Application Id", The user selects this option
3. User should be able to see the page where the user was before being logged out i.e start of Screen D as Screen A,B and C have been saved to Persistant Store (DB in this case).

I understand from the analysis I have done uptil now that we need to implement something called as ConversationManager where SWF wil delegate the call but what I I really want to know :

1. How is the ConversationManager implemented, do we have to write a custom class, if yes what are the methods, method inputs and attributes that we have to save to DB?
2. How will the flowExecutionUrl be saved to DB and how to retrieve it back from the database

I am expecting any and every help from all the authors / evangelists of Spring Web Flow who have been there and done that!

Thanks in Advance,
Yogendra