Spring boot based websocket application and capturing http session id

I was involved in a project recently where we needed to capture the http session id for a websocket request - the reason was to determine the number of websocket sessions utilizing the same underlying http session

The way to do this is based on a sample utilizing the new spring-session module and is described here.

The trick to capturing the http session id is in understanding that before a websocket connection is established between the browser and the server, there is a handshake phase negotiated over http and the session id is passed to the server during this handshake phase.

Spring Websocket support provides a nice way to register a HandShakeInterceptor, which can be used to capture the http session id and set this in the sub-protocol(typically STOMP) headers. First, this is the way to capture the session id and set it to a header:

public class HttpSessionIdHandshakeInterceptor implements HandshakeInterceptor {

 @Override
 public boolean beforeHandshake(ServerHttpRequest request, ServerHttpResponse response, WebSocketHandler wsHandler, Map<String, Object> attributes) throws Exception {
  if (request instanceof ServletServerHttpRequest) {
   ServletServerHttpRequest servletRequest = (ServletServerHttpRequest) request;
   HttpSession session = servletRequest.getServletRequest().getSession(false);
   if (session != null) {
    attributes.put("HTTPSESSIONID", session.getId());
   }
  }
  return true;
 }

 public void afterHandshake(ServerHttpRequest request, ServerHttpResponse response, WebSocketHandler wsHandler, Exception ex) {
 }
}

And to register this HandshakeInterceptor with Spring Websocket support:

@Configuration
@EnableWebSocketMessageBroker
public class WebSocketDefaultConfig extends AbstractWebSocketMessageBrokerConfigurer {

 @Override
 public void configureMessageBroker(MessageBrokerRegistry config) {
  config.enableSimpleBroker("/topic/", "/queue/");
  config.setApplicationDestinationPrefixes("/app");
 }

 @Override
 public void registerStompEndpoints(StompEndpointRegistry registry) {
  registry.addEndpoint("/chat").withSockJS().setInterceptors(httpSessionIdHandshakeInterceptor());
 }

 @Bean
 public HttpSessionIdHandshakeInterceptor httpSessionIdHandshakeInterceptor() {
  return new HttpSessionIdHandshakeInterceptor();
 }

}

Now that the session id is a part of the STOMP headers, this can be grabbed as a STOMP header, the following is a sample where it is being grabbed when subscriptions are registered to the server:

@Component
public class StompSubscribeEventListener implements ApplicationListener<SessionSubscribeEvent> {

 private static final Logger logger = LoggerFactory.getLogger(StompSubscribeEventListener.class);

 @Override
 public void onApplicationEvent(SessionSubscribeEvent sessionSubscribeEvent) {
  StompHeaderAccessor headerAccessor = StompHeaderAccessor.wrap(sessionSubscribeEvent.getMessage());
  logger.info(headerAccessor.getSessionAttributes().get("HTTPSESSIONID").toString());
 }
}

or it can be grabbed from a controller method handling websocket messages as a MessageHeaders parameter:

@MessageMapping("/chats/{chatRoomId}")
 public void handleChat(@Payload ChatMessage message, @DestinationVariable("chatRoomId") String chatRoomId, MessageHeaders messageHeaders, Principal user) {
  logger.info(messageHeaders.toString());
  this.simpMessagingTemplate.convertAndSend("/topic/chats." + chatRoomId, "[" + getTimestamp() + "]:" + user.getName() + ":" + message.getMessage());
 }

Here is a complete working sample which implements this pattern.