Can Cognos Analytics be automatically redirected on session timeout?

Answer

There are two sessions in such a scenario:
1. The "Cognos session" - established with Cognos Analytics
2. The "Outer session" - established with some product external to Cognos Analytics.

There is no way in Cognos Analytics to make the product react to a Cognos session expiry automatically, like re-directing somewhere. This is due to the design.

Once a client establishes an authenticated session with CA, the client receives a session cookie which refers to an internal session object. On every subsequent request the client sends, that session cookie must be sent along for CA to acknowledge the request being part of an already authenticated session. If the Cognos session to which that cookie refers to has expired, CA only "notices" once a request is sent in and only then can react to it. So in laymen terms, only a gesture/click made by the user will result in a request being sent to CA and CA will be able to react to an expired session.

For example: User leaves the screen and comes back after 1 hour and the Cognos session had expired in the meantime. In this scenario, the browser will still show the User Interface as left. Only when the user clicks on something will this actually result in a request being sent to CA things can happen.

The challenge, which is even bigger with CA now due to new application design (in particular the client container) is that not every "gesture" in the user interface necessarily triggers a request being sent. For example: Things like clicking on a menu item might just cause the JS in the client container to show a fly-out. Hence no request will be sent though the GUI appears to be functional.