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# Session Management

## Introduction

This chapter describes the basic Cocoon session management using the session transformer.

The chapter "Special Contexts" explains some special contexts which do not require a session. They are available everytime. These special contexts are the request context and the temporary context.

## Session Tracking

If a user has a session, Cocoon is able to connect new requests from this user to the session of the user. This is done by session tracking. Basically, the session tracking of Cocoon uses the session tracking of the environment, which is usually the servlet engine.

There are two methods for session tracking: cookies and url rewriting. If you use cookies, you don't have to care about session tracking. Just refer to the documentation of your servlet engine on how to turn on cookies for session handling.

URL rewriting instead is a little bit complicated. For url rewriting, each link the user can select, needs a special session ID appended to this link. Unfortunately, this is not done automatically by Cocoon or the servlet engine. You can either do this by hand or you can use the encodeURL transformer just before the html serializer.

## Sessions

The session action is responsible for creating and terminating a session. It is controlled by a sitemap parameter named "action". This parameter can have the values "create" and "terminate". If no parameter is set, it defaults to "create".

The action either creates a new session immediately (if not already available), or terminates it (if available).

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