[SalesForce] When do Sessions expire

I note that Session Settings allows you to have sessions expire as often as low as 15 minutes. However, I believe this is related to browser sessions and sure enough they do time out as expected.

However, I have a scheduled batch job (runs hourly) where I inject the Session Id as part of the initial state of the scheduled job (which then passes it to batch). The batch job then makes a callout using a REST service, e.g.:

    req.setHeader('Authorization', 'OAuth ' + sessionId );

This job has been running for over a day now and the session does not appear to expire.

As it happens, this behaviour is perfect for my use case but I am concerned it won't be reliable. When will the session timeout? Can I rely on it?

Best Answer

Sessions expire after the specified amount of idle time (see below), rather than an absolute time period. So, assuming your session timeout is at least an hour, you will keep it active by making a call every hour.

I wouldn't rely on this behavior for the long term, though. If the org admin reduces the session timeout, you will find your batch job failing. A more robust solution would be to do OAuth, keep the refresh token, and exchange it for an access token (aka session id) every hour (simpler) or whenever you get a session expired response (more efficient, but more complex).

The actual session timeout behavior, from the docs:

The last active session time value isn’t updated until halfway through the timeout period. That is, if you have a 30 minute timeout, the system won’t check for activity until 15 minutes have passed. For example, assume you have a 30 minute timeout value. If you update a record after 10 minutes, the last active session time value won’t be updated because there was no activity after 15 minutes. You’ll be logged out in 20 more minutes (30 minutes total) because the last active session time wasn’t updated. Suppose you update a record after 20 minutes. That’s five minutes after the last active session time is checked, so your timeout resets and you have another 30 minutes before being logged out, for a total of 50 minutes.

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