I've found EF to be helpful and very responsive.
Originally Posted by
baliktad
Things like the Refine Query link don't work after 45 minutes as it is (dump back to login)
Maybe there are other ways of looking at the problem besides one of staying logged in or keeping a session up. For me, what I find myself wanting to do a lot is a "refine query" when I have query results on several web tabs or pages, or after my session has timed out. I can think of a couple ways this could be done (which is easy since I'm not constrained by knowing how your system works).
A "stateless" approach would encode all query fields as URL attributes (like a Google search). This would allow for "refine query" to be done on a query result from any page or age.
Another approach would automatically save the last n queries (where n might be 1, 5, 10), with a name derived from the query type and some of it's fields. Again, it would be a way to do a "refine query" after timing out or even closing the browser.
Session states can be burdensome on a server. One approach isolates the memory into a context which can be saved to disk after logoff and restored on login. This let's you pick up where you left off.
I think it may be possible to think about what people want to do, and what the system can do, with an EF focus (the kinds of things people do in EF are very different from FT).