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Preventing application timeouts

This article describes how to configure Unblu so your visitors aren’t automatically logged out of their session with your website when using Unblu.

Introduction

Web applications like e-banking that require user authentication often have a timeout. If the timeout is reached, the user is logged out for security reasons.

The timeout is typically reset by some kind of user activity, such as interacting with the page or navigating between different pages of the application.

If Unblu is integrated in your web application, however, your website is unaware of the interaction between the user and Unblu. As a result, your users could be logged out of their e-banking, for example, while using Unblu.

Conversely, Unblu may automatically reset the timeout countdown when the client-side Unblu code sends a request to the Unblu server. This creates a potential security risk.

Activity tracking

To prevent your users from being logged out of their web application session, you can configure Unblu to track user activity and inform the application when the user interacts with Unblu. Your web application can then use this information to determine whether to end a user’s session.

Activity triggers

You can configure the types of interaction that should trigger an activity with the configuration property com.unblu.conversation.activity.activityCategoriesToTrack. The available options are:

CONVERSATION_OPEN

Unblu triggers an activity when the user starts a new conversation or opens an existing conversation.

CHAT

Unblu triggers an activity when the user is typing in a chat conversation. It also does so when they send a message, be that to transmit a message they’ve entered, a predefined response to a question, or to grant a request for collaboration.

LAYERS_COLLABORATION

Unblu can trigger an activity in collaboration layers in two different ways:

  • When the visitor moves the cursor or clicks the collaboration layer with their mouse.

  • Automatically every 10 seconds. This is primarily intended for cases where one participant is sharing content with the other participants in a conversation, for example in a presentation.

    You configure the collaboration layers that Unblu should automatically trigger an activity for with the configuration property com.unblu.conversation.activity.layerTypesThatTriggerActivityWhileDisplayed. When one of the collaboration layers listed in the configuration property is running and visible, Unblu triggers an activity for each conversation participant every 10 seconds.

CALL

During audio and video calls, Unblu automatically triggers an activity for each participant in the call every 10 seconds. It doesn’t trigger an activity for conversation participants who aren’t taking part in the call.

Unblu tracks the activity of both visitors and agents, and it does so individually for each person in a conversation. If there are four participants in a conversation, for example, and only two of them are writing messages, Unblu will only trigger activity events for those two participants. The exception to this rule is when Unblu triggers activities automatically, as described above.

To reduce the number of triggers, especially if there’s a lot of activity in a conversation, Unblu automatically throttles the frequency with which it updates the agent and visitor sessions related to a conversation. The participants' sessions are updated no more frequently than every 10 seconds.

Activity endpoints

When Unblu triggers an activity, it sends the activity to a number of endpoints so your web application can process them.

  • Both the Visitor JS API and the link:../../../reference/unblu-embedded-js-api/Embedded JS API], have a personActivityListener that’s called whenever Unblu triggers an activity event for a person.

  • You can configure Unblu to call a URL endpoint when there’s activity by a visitor. The configuration property for setting the URL to call is com.unblu.visitor.activity.activityTriggerUrl.

    To reduce network activity, you can configure the interval between calls to the URL endpoint with the configuration property com.unblu.visitor.activity.activityTriggerUrlThrottlingInSeconds. The default interval is 60 seconds, and the shortest interval allowed is 10 seconds.

    The call to the URL endpoint is only triggered in the Floating Visitor UI, the Embedded Visitor UI, and the Visitor Desk. It doesn’t contain any data, and you can’t configure any headers. If you need that, consider using the JS API instead.

  • The Unblu mobile SDKs both provide endpoints for activities.