Any ideas till when the response variables that are sent through siteminder are present for use? Is it till the user session terminates? Or is it also present in any cache too?
All response attributes are cached on the web agent. There are two conditions:
The cache duration for each attribute is set on the WAM UI response attribute page. A value of 0 means that the attribute should not be cachec at all.
The response attribute cache is only valid until the user session is cached on the agent. If the agent has to remove the user's session cache entry the cached response attributes are also deleted.
Effectively for a user session that has not logged out, the web agent will keep the attributes cached until the two conditions are met.
On logout the web agent that processes the logout URL deletes the user session data from cache and informs the policy server. If you are not processing the logout through all the applications that the user logged onto the cache will remain on the agents that did not received the logout request for that user session. In this case, the attributes will continue to be in the web agent cache until the agent deletes the entry.
Please note that unless the SMSESSION is produced it is impossible for the agent to retrieve any data from the cache.
I hope this helps.