WebScarab uses the concept of a session to relate various conversations. It is compulsory to have a session when using WebScarab, because each conversation is written to the session as it is seen, and read back from the session when requested.

At the moment, sessions can only be saved to a directory on the filesystem. When creating a new session, you should select an empty directory, or provide the name of a directory that should be created.

When WebScarab starts up, it prompts you to choose what kind of session to use. The default option is to create a temporary session. This temporary session is a directory created in the ${java.io.tmpdir} directory, using a pattern of webscarabnnnnn.tmp.

Note:This temporary directory is deleted when WebScarab exits. If you wish to preserve the audit record for later review, you should start a new session before creating or intercepting any conversations. Alternatively, if you need to save a temporary session that already contains conversations, you should NOT exit WebScarab. First change to a new session, or open an existing session. This causes WebScarab to flush some memory-based data structures to disk. Then copy or move the temporary session directory to a new location.

Note:It could be really useful for WebScarab to store its sessions in a SQL database. Each of the plugins have been implemented with an interface to its "datastore". As mentioned, there is currently a FileSystemStore implementation of these interfaces, which could be used as a template for implementing a SQLStore. For standalone use, WebScarab could use HSQLDB, or could be configured to use an external database such as Oracle or PostgreSQL. This would be a great feature for an interested person to contribute to WebScarab.