Scope 'session' is not active for the current thread; IllegalStateException: No thread-bound request found

Question

I have a controller that I'd like to be unique per session. According to the spring documentation there are two details to the implementation:

1. Initial web configuration

To support the scoping of beans at the request, session, and global session levels (web-scoped beans), some minor initial configuration is required before you define your beans.

I've added the following to my web.xml as shown in the documentation:

<listener>
  <listener-class>
    org.springframework.web.context.request.RequestContextListener
  </listener-class>
</listener>

2. Scoped beans as dependencies

If you want to inject (for example) an HTTP request scoped bean into another bean, you must inject an AOP proxy in place of the scoped bean.

I've annotated the bean with @Scope providing the proxyMode as shown below:

@Controller
@Scope(value="session", proxyMode=ScopedProxyMode.TARGET_CLASS)
public class ReportBuilder implements Serializable {
    ...
    ...
}

Problem

In spite of the above configuration, I get the following exception:

org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException: Error creating bean with name 'scopedTarget.reportBuilder': Scope 'session' is not active for the current thread; consider defining a scoped proxy for this bean if you intend to refer to it from a singleton; nested exception is java.lang.IllegalStateException: No thread-bound request found: Are you referring to request attributes outside of an actual web request, or processing a request outside of the originally receiving thread? If you are actually operating within a web request and still receive this message, your code is probably running outside of DispatcherServlet/DispatcherPortlet: In this case, use RequestContextListener or RequestContextFilter to expose the current request.

Update 1

Below is my component scan. I have the following in web.xml:

<context-param>
  <param-name>contextClass</param-name>
  <param-value>
    org.springframework.web.context.support.AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext
  </param-value>
</context-param>

<context-param>
  <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
  <param-value>org.example.AppConfig</param-value>
</context-param>

<listener>
  <listener-class>org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener</listener-class>
</listener>

And the following in AppConfig.java:

@Configuration
@EnableAsync
@EnableCaching
@ComponentScan("org.example")
@ImportResource("classpath:applicationContext.xml")
public class AppConfig implements AsyncConfigurer {
  ...
  ...
}

Update 2

I've created a reproducible test case. This is a much smaller project, so there are differences, but the same error happens. There's quite a few files, so I've uploaded it as a tar.gz to megafileupload.

Answer 1

I'm answering my own question because it provides a better overview of the cause and possible solutions. I've awarded the bonus to @Martin because he pin pointed the cause.

Cause

As suggested by @Martin the cause is the use of multiple threads. The request object is not available in these threads, as mentioned in the Spring Guide:

DispatcherServlet, RequestContextListener and RequestContextFilter all do exactly the same thing, namely bind the HTTP request object to the Thread that is servicing that request. This makes beans that are request- and session-scoped available further down the call chain.

Solution 1

It is possible to make the request object available to other threads, but it places a couple of limitations on the system, which may not be workable in all projects. I got this solution from Accessing request scoped beans in a multi-threaded web application:

I managed to get around this issue. I started using SimpleAsyncTaskExecutor instead of WorkManagerTaskExecutor / ThreadPoolExecutorFactoryBean. The benefit is that SimpleAsyncTaskExecutor will never re-use threads. That's only half the solution. The other half of the solution is to use a RequestContextFilter instead of RequestContextListener. RequestContextFilter (as well as DispatcherServlet) has a threadContextInheritable property which basically allows child threads to inherit the parent context.

Solution 2

The only other option is to use the session scoped bean inside the request thread. In my case this wasn't possible because:

1. The controller method is annotated with @Async;
2. The controller method starts a batch job which uses threads for parallel job steps.