[Question]: Why do CheckSession and SilentRenew stop working?

[soners]

What Version of the library are you using? Tested on v11.6.11 and v12.0.3

Question Hello Developers!

We are using following configuration (It is called Implicit flow with Silent Renew if I am not mistaken)

We had this problem that when you have multiple tabs open, when the next silent renew rotation comes in nothing happens. So user had to refresh the page (we had an AuthGuard which first tries to forceRefreshSession() and refreshes the page on behalf of user when there is not a valid token). It was quite frustrating for our users because having multiple tabs is a quite common use case for the product. So I looked up all of the solutions you provided within bugs and questions. We used to use custom Auth Storage instead of default one, so solution with removing custom auth storage(basically means using sessionStorage instead of localStorage) seemed to help at first. However for some users it performs even worse and following happens.

At some point throughout the user session, either we configured something wrong or library stops working, we do not receive any check session logs or silent renew logs, new tokens. I first suspected of iframes, but when there is no iframe library creates one.

We use following events to get the new token and try to refresh session if something is broken

We use following events to log off user

I skimmed through the source code and found out there is only one way to stop checkSession which is logoffLocal, and I made sure we do not call it unless user clicks the LogOut button from the UI. Same goes for the SilentRenew. On the other hand problem is not tied to having multiple tabs, but it is more likely to happen when there are 5+ tabs.

I would be happy to hear from you if you heard about this issue before, please let me know if you want more information about how we use the library!

Thanks in advance!

[soners]

Hello @damienbod and @FabianGosebrink

I think my suspicion was correct 😄 We have a lead on the root cause of it. I think this also explains why it suddenly stops working and sending logs.

This is a stack trace of an error that we caught from the angular-auth-oidc-client library. We would really appreciate if you can help out with this.