Overview

The purpose of this article is to explain how Contour's licensing works and offer suggestions for maximizing the use of your set of licenses.

How it Works

When a user logs into Contour, a license is associated with that user.  When the user clicks on the "log out" link, Contour frees the license for other users.  Note - at this point, the server session between that user and the server still exists but the license is freed for other users.   This can be a little confusing as there may be many more sessions active on the server than users within Contour.

If a user closes their web browser rather than logging out, Contour isn't aware of this event so the license remains assigned to the user until the user session times out on the application server.   When the session times out, the application server fires an event and notifies Contour to free up the license. 

By default, session timeout is set to 8 hours for Contour.  This default is by customer request as most users like to keep Contour open during the work day and not worry about timing out.  The default value can easily be changed by modifying the value in the web.xml file on the server. (see below)

The best approach to maximizing license use is to ask users to "log out" rather than close their browser.  This may not be effective so an alternative is to reduce the timeout value - see below.

We are also enhancing the user management features within Contour and will be adding the ability for administrators to see who's logged in and manually log out users.  In addition we are looking at ways to best manage how Contour handles timeout.  This is currently scheduled for Q1 2008.

Modifying the Session Timeout Value (Tomcat)

To modify the session timeout, modify the file web.xml which is located in {appserver directory}/webapps/contour/WEB-INF

Here is the section that can be modified - the value is in minutes.  If you make a change, we reccomend keeping a copy of the file separately so it's easy to copy back after updating Contour.  This will be moved to a system property stored in the database in the near future.

<web-app>
  <session-config>
    <session-timeout>60</session-timeout>
  </session-config>

  ...
</web-app>