I'm new to JSF and I was doing some research about Scopes and Http session lifecycles, but one thing was not clear to me.
I know that is possible to store variables using sessionMap from ExternalContext, and it used to work very fine for what I needed. I also know that when the session is invalidated all the data stored on the map is lost.
However, what I don't know is: when the page is refreshed the session is invalidated?
My problem appeared when I had to put a download request on one of the buttons from my web application. Apparently download requests cannot be made via Ajax, so the entire page have to be refreshed. The download proceed normaly, but after that, all the data stored on the map is gone, including all the managed beans. The user data itself is not that important as I can store it and then put it again on the new session map. But what about the managed beans? How should I proceed?
Assuming that it's not the webbrowser who misbehaved, this can only happen if the server side code is actually by itself invalidating the session by calling ExternalContext#invalidateSession() or HttpSession#invalidate().
If you can't seem to nail it down, then create a HttpSessionListener and put a debug breakpoint on sessionDestroyed() method and investigate the call stack who initiated it and why.