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

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?

I'm answering my own question because it provides a better overview of the cause and possible solutions. I've awarded the bonus to @Martin because he pin pointed the cause.

Cause

As suggested by @Martin the cause is the use of multiple threads. The request object is not available in these threads, as mentioned in the Spring Guide:

DispatcherServlet, RequestContextListener and RequestContextFilter all do exactly the same thing, namely bind the HTTP request object to the Thread that is servicing that request. This makes beans that are request- and session-scoped available further down the call chain.

Solution 1

It is possible to make the request object available to other threads, but it places a couple of limitations on the system, which may not be workable in all projects. I got this solution from Accessing request scoped beans in a multi-threaded web application:

I managed to get around this issue. I started using SimpleAsyncTaskExecutor instead of WorkManagerTaskExecutor / ThreadPoolExecutorFactoryBean. The benefit is that SimpleAsyncTaskExecutor will never re-use threads. That's only half the solution. The other half of the solution is to use a RequestContextFilter instead of RequestContextListener. RequestContextFilter (as well as DispatcherServlet) has a threadContextInheritable property which basically allows child threads to inherit the parent context.

Solution 2

The only other option is to use the session scoped bean inside the request thread. In my case this wasn't possible because:

1. The controller method is annotated with @Async;
2. The controller method starts a batch job which uses threads for parallel job steps.

If anyone else stuck on same point, following solved my problem.

In web.xml

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

In Session component

@Component
@Scope(value = "session",  proxyMode = ScopedProxyMode.TARGET_CLASS)

In pom.xml

    <dependency>
        <groupId>cglib</groupId>
        <artifactId>cglib</artifactId>
        <version>3.1</version>
    </dependency>