rb:marksession

This attribute is part of the Whitebeam session tracking mechanism. This topic is covered in some detail in the session techical note. In summary, the Whitebeam system assigns each identifiable browser a unique session ID - that expires after not being used for a specific period of time. The Presentation Engine has to be able to embed this session ID at the client and to have the client return the ID with each request.

In the case of a client with cookies enabled this is straightforward - the Presentation Engine always attempts to write the session id to a client side cookie. For those cases where th client refuses to accept cookies, and the web designer wants to work with those clients, there is slightly more work to be done. This is where the 'rb:marksession' attribute is used.

At each point in a presentation page that includes a URL pointing back to a Pattern Page on the the same site, add the rb:marksession="yes" attribute to the referening XML tag. The most common examples of these are the anchor tag, <a href="..."> and the <form action="???"...> tags. There are plenty of others.

Wherever the presentation engine encounters an instance of this attribute within the presentation page it has the following behaviour:

if the enclosing tag is a <form...> tag then
   insert a hidden form item:
      <input type="hidden" name="Red60urne" value="SessionId">
else
   if tag contains an 'href' attribute
      Insert Re60urne=SessionId into the query string;

   if tag contains an 'src' attribute
      Insert Re60urne=SessionId into the query string;
endif

In this psuedo code SessionId is the unique ID allocated to this specific client session.