Session locks are a mechanism managed by the Diffusion™ Cloud server to coordinate access to shared resources among multiple sessions.

A session can acquire a lock, identified by a lock name (chosen by you to suit your application). Once a session acquires a lock, no other session can acquire the same lock.

Acquiring a lock does not automatically change anything else about a session. Locks are not linked to topics or permissions, except through your application's logic. It is up to you to design a suitable locking scheme and ensure your application implements it. For example, if you want to implement exclusive updating of a topic using a session lock, you must make sure that each session always acquires the lock and uses a lock constraint created from the lock when updating the topic.

By default, a lock is released when the session owning it closes. Alternatively, when acquiring a lock, a session can specify that the lock will be released if connection to the server is lost. This is done using a scope parameter.

A session can also explicitly release a lock.

Acquiring a lock

Required permissions: acquire_lock

Session locks are established on demand. There is no separate operation to create or destroy a named lock.

If a session attempts to acquire a lock that is not assigned, the server assigns it immediately to the session.

If a session attempts to acquire a lock that is already assigned, the server will record that the session is waiting to acquire it. When a lock is released and multiple sessions are waiting to acquire it, the server will arbitrarily assign it to one of the waiting sessions.