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IBM Data and AI Ideas Portal for Customers


This portal is to open public enhancement requests against products and services offered by the IBM Data & AI organization. To view all of your ideas submitted to IBM, create and manage groups of Ideas, or create an idea explicitly set to be either visible by all (public) or visible only to you and IBM (private), use the IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com).


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Specific links you will want to bookmark for future use

Welcome to the IBM Ideas Portal (https://www.ibm.com/ideas) - Use this site to find out additional information and details about the IBM Ideas process and statuses.

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ideasibm@us.ibm.com - Use this email to suggest enhancements to the Ideas process or request help from IBM for submitting your Ideas.

IBM Employees should enter Ideas at https://ideas.ibm.com


Status Not under consideration
Workspace Cognos Analytics
Created by Guest
Created on Oct 24, 2018

Better session inactivity timeout behavior with 3rd party SSO/security software

Cognos supports 3rd party security/IAM software (similar to SiteMinder) using a Trusted Signon Provider, or via Websphere Libery container. Security software typically includes a web server/reverse proxy layer that validates every request. This is how the security software enforces authentication and session inactivity timeout. If the user doesn't have a valid session, no requests are forwarded to the secured endpoint, such as Cognos. Instead, those requests get intercepted, and the requester gets an HTTP redirect response, such as code 301, to the authentication page.

Here's what happens with Cognos 11.0.11 with 3rd party security and session timeout:
- User leaves browser idle longer than inactivity timeout on a Cognos Analytics page.
- On coming back to the browser, the page is just as the user left it, but the SSO session is now invalid.
- User clicks somewhere in the interface. Depending on where they click, they may get:
* An empty response (e.g. Team Content just shows as empty)
* An error
- There is no messaging in the UI to indicate what has happened.
- If the user is smart enough to refresh the entire page, their browser gets redirected to the security software's login page

Desired enhancement is to have the Cognos Analytics REST calls recover gracefully from session inactivity, as indicated by REST calls returning a redirect status, and to have the UI recover as when Cognos manages session inactivity timeout.