sessionscoped

SessionScoped is a scope annotation used in Java EE's Contexts and Dependency Injection (CDI) and in JavaServer Faces (JSF) to define the lifecycle of a bean. In CDI, a bean annotated with @SessionScoped has its lifecycle bound to the HTTP session. A single instance is created for a user’s session when the bean is first needed and is reused for all subsequent requests within that session. The bean persists through multiple requests and pages for the same user, until the HTTP session ends due to logout, invalidation, or timeout.

Across different user sessions, separate bean instances exist. This makes session scope suitable for maintaining user-specific state across pages and requests, such as a shopping cart, user preferences, or temporary form data during a logged-in session. The scope is tied to the session lifecycle, so the bean is destroyed when the session ends.

In CDI deployments, session-scoped beans are typically required to be Serializable to support possible passivation or replication in clustered environments. If the container passivates sessions, the bean should implement Serializable to avoid runtime issues.

In JSF, there is also a legacy annotation to define session scope: javax.faces.bean.SessionScoped. While it serves a similar purpose for JSF managed beans, using CDI’s @SessionScoped is generally preferred in modern applications to leverage CDI features, dependency injection, and better interoperability with other CDI scopes and contexts. The two annotations belong to different ecosystems and have distinct lifecycles and injection semantics.