spring - Scope 'session' is not active for the current thread; IllegalStateException: No thread-bound request found

Question

I have a controller that I'd like to be unique per session. According to the spring documentation there are two details to the implementation:

1. Initial web configuration

To support the scoping of beans at the request, session, and global session levels (web-scoped beans), some minor initial configuration is required before you define your beans.

I've added the following to my web.xml as shown in the documentation:

<listener>
  <listener-class>
    org.springframework.web.context.request.RequestContextListener
  </listener-class>
</listener>

2. Scoped beans as dependencies

If you want to inject (for example) an HTTP request scoped bean into another bean, you must inject an AOP proxy in place of the scoped bean.

I've annotated the bean with @Scope providing the proxyMode as shown below:

@Controller
@Scope(value="session", proxyMode=ScopedProxyMode.TARGET_CLASS)
public class ReportBuilder implements Serializable {
    ...
    ...
}

Problem

In spite of the above configuration, I get the following exception:

org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException: Error creating bean with name 'scopedTarget.reportBuilder': Scope 'session' is not active for the current thread; consider defining a scoped proxy for this bean if you intend to refer to it from a singleton; nested exception is java.lang.IllegalStateException: No thread-bound request found: Are you referring to request attributes outside of an actual web request, or processing a request outside of the originally receiving thread? If you are actually operating within a web request and still receive this message, your code is probably running outside of DispatcherServlet/DispatcherPortlet: In this case, use RequestContextListener or RequestContextFilter to expose the current request.

Update 1

Below is my component scan. I have the following in web.xml:

<context-param>
  <param-name>contextClass</param-name>
  <param-value>
    org.springframework.web.context.support.AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext
  </param-value>
</context-param>

<context-param>
  <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
  <param-value>org.example.AppConfig</param-value>
</context-param>

<listener>
  <listener-class>org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener</listener-class>
</listener>

And the following in AppConfig.java:

@Configuration
@EnableAsync
@EnableCaching
@ComponentScan("org.example")
@ImportResource("classpath:applicationContext.xml")
public class AppConfig implements AsyncConfigurer {
  ...
  ...
}

Update 2

I've created a reproducible test case. This is a much smaller project, so there are differences, but the same error happens. There's quite a few files, so I've uploaded it as a tar.gz to megafileupload.

Answer 1

The problem is not in your Spring annotations but your design pattern. You mix together different scopes and threads:

• singleton
• session (or request)
• thread pool of jobs

The singleton is available anywhere, it is ok. However session/request scope is not available outside a thread that is attached to a request.

Asynchronous job can run even the request or session doesn't exist anymore, so it is not possible to use a request/session dependent bean. Also there is no way to know, if your are running a job in a separate thread, which thread is the originator request (it means aop:proxy is not helpful in this case).

---

I think your code looks like that you want to make a contract between ReportController, ReportBuilder, UselessTask and ReportPage. Is there a way to use just a simple class (POJO) to store data from UselessTask and read it in ReportController or ReportPage and do not use ReportBuilder anymore?