Page Comparison

The ClientStorageService is an advanced, and highly strongly recommended, option that includes support for HTML Local Storage along with cookies as a fallback or alternative. It is the default mechanism for storage of sessions that allow for SSO and we recommend it for that purpose to the exclusion of the server-side options.

Local Storage support is enabled by default for new installation, but note that it requires JavaScript be enabled, because reading and writing to the client requires an explicit page be rendered. When JavaScript is enabled, the additional page appears quickly as a short-lived interstitial with a message about the loading or saving of the data to the client. In practice, it is has no material impact on the user experience and the loading page only appears when a new session with the servlet container is created.

Controlling this the Local Storage feature is handled by the idp.storage.htmlLocalStorage property.

No additional configuration is required, but you may want to change the look and feel of the templates that are displayed to the client while data is being read or written. These pages don't require any user interaction as long as JavaScript is enabled, but they tend to be visible at least briefly, particularly the first time through. They're somewhat similar to the templates displayed when SAML messages are handed off to the browser.

Much of that look is obviously controlled by style sheets and message properties, but the "visible" portions are in views/client-storage (to avoid losing your changes on upgrades).

As to why you would use Local Storage vs. just allowing use of cookies with this storage implementation, there are really two main reasons:

• Logout

• Consent

The main reason for this feature is to enable the IdP's session manager to track and index the sessions created with SPs, and that information does not fit reliably in a cookie. That makes the single-logout feature unusable with client-side sessions unless Local Storage is enabled, since the IdP doesn't know what SPs to communicate with. Enabling the Local Storage feature is necessary but not sufficient to allow at least some form of single logout to work without moving session storage to the server. You also will need to ensure a couple of additional session management properties (idp.session.trackSPSessions and idp.session.secondaryServiceIndex) are enabled, and they are also on by default in new installs. There are two properties because the latter is more a SAML-specific need that may not extend to other protocols in the future.

The consent feature is very limited when cookies are used because the number of records it can store is extremely small. If Local Storage is available, that limit is essentially ignored. If you're comfortable with tracking consent per-device, this is a much more practical simpler way to deploy it at most sites than with a database. Of course, many deployers are not comfortable with per-device consent, but those same deployers may become a lot more comfortable with it after enough database connection failures due to the nearly universally poor quality of JDBC networking code.