[whatwg] How to handle Session Expiry in ServiceWorker

[Richard Maher]

If a Fetch in my ServiceWorker receives a 401 from the server how do I
re-authenticate with the server if I have no focused or foregrounded client?

NB: I'm talking about POST requests updating the server and not just
reading from cache until the network is back.

Bring the client back into focus? Scary for user with no action causing
that reaction and they may not be there to login again anyway.

What does Background-Synch do if it gets a 401?

If navigator.credentials was surfaced in a ServiceWorker that would be
enough!

Sessions that never expire?

What are other people doing?

Yet again I'm banned from W3C/IETF Github :-(

If someone could add the following to ServiceWorker issues
<https://github.com/w3c/ServiceWorker/issues/new> that would help: - Please
see Use-Case
<https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47320790/how-to-handle-session-expiry-in-serviceworker>

If a User Session has expired a ServiceWorker currently has no mechanisms
available to re-authenticate with the server as there is no heuristic
mechanism available for determining credentials.

If the credentials.get() was available then re-authentication could take
place transparently. If federated (say Google) then if the user had logged
out then that state would be honoured.

[Richard Maher]

It seems there has been discussion on this before. Please see GitHub
<https://github.com/w3c/ServiceWorker/issues/1231>



I think that background re-authenticating should be infrequent enough that
a notification of the sign-in or failure is an appropriate and
user-friendly solution.

Please comment over there if you have any ideas!