Understand Interview Session Timeouts

Intelligent Advisor discards in-progress interview sessions after a certain period of inactivity. By default, this time period is 30 minutes.

Note: In Intelligent Advisor Cloud Service the timeout period cannot be changed. In self-managed Intelligent Advisor administrators can configure the interview timeout.

In web interviews:

  • Five minutes before the interview session is about to expire, the user is shown a warning giving them the option to extend the interview.

    An interview showing a timeout warning message
  • If no action is taken within those five minutes, the user is shown a message indicating that the interview session has now expired.

    An interview showing a session expired message

The behavior, appearance and configuration of the timeout and session expired warnings depends on the interview version that the project is using.

For Latest Version Interviews:

  • When the user receives a timeout warning, they can click the 'Keep working' button, or interact with the page, to keep the session active. There is no limit to how many times the interview can be extended.
  • You can extend the timeout on an interview session using an interview extension (via the ping() method on the interview object).
  • You can provide an 'Exit' button on the interview expired banner that when clicked takes the user to a specified location. For more information, see Allow an Interview to Be Exited.
  • The message text for timeouts and expired sessions can be changed. For more information, see Built-in warning text settings and Built-in error text settings. The applicable settings are:
    • timeout-warning-header-text - By default, the text is "TIMEOUT WARNING".
    • timeout-warning-message-text - By default, the text is "Your session will expire shortly. Keep working to extend your session.".
    • expired-session-header-text - By default, the text is "SESSION EXPIRED".
    • expired-session-message-text - By default, the text is "Your session has expired.".
  • The button text for timeouts and expired sessions can also be changed. For more information, see Button text settings. The applicable settings are:
    • timeout-warning-button-text - By default, the text is "KEEP WORKING".
    • expired-session-button-text - By default, the text is "EXIT INTERVIEW".

For August 2016 interviews:

  • When the user receives a timeout warning, they can click the 'OK' button, or perform one of the following actions to keep the session active:
    • Click the Back or Next button
    • Navigate to another screen
    • Download a form (if available)
    • Add or remove an entity instance (if available)

    Note that entering data into fields on a screen does not reset the timeout clock

  • The message text for timeouts and expired sessions can be changed. For more information, see Built-in warning text settings. The applicable settings are:
    • interview-timeout-pending - By default, the text is "This interview session will expire shortly. Press OK to extend the session.".
    • interview-timeout-expired - By default, the text is "This interview session has expired."
  • The button text in the timeout warning can also be changed. To do this, change the text in the HTML tag for the <button> element in the interview-timeout-pending string setting referred to above.
  • For interviews that are using a web service connector, it is recommended that the default interview expired messages be overridden to link back to an appropriate application page (not an Intelligent Advisor interview page) where:
    • Users will be prompted to login in again, if needed
    • The option is shown to resume from an interview checkpoint, if available

    The messages to override to include this link are NoActiveSessionError and interview-timeout-expired.