How do you re-validate the token for session management?

Core Library

MSAL.js v2 (@azure/msal-browser)

Core Library Version

2.13.1

Wrapper Library

Not Applicable

Wrapper Library Version

NA

Public or Confidential Client?

Public

Description

I have a single page React app. I use this @azure/msal-browser package’s loginPopup() API to let my app user login using their Azure AD credentials. Once successfully signed in, their login data e.g. access token etc gets stored in the local storage.

My question is how do I check the validity of the access token for the. session? i.e. if the token has passed its expiration time? Do I can see the MSAL response does have “exp”: 1662430649, (Unix timestamp) value of expiration. Do I save this in the local storage and check\update on each user interaction or save session data in the backend database and do the validations? Does the MS Graph API or the @azure/msal-browser package provides any API to validate the expiry of the token?

MSAL Configuration

Not relevant to my question

Relevant Code Snippets

Not applicable

Identity Provider

Azure AD / MSA

Source

External (Customer)

[bmahall]

@DewangS Thanks for elaborating further. As @derisen mentioned above, the idToken is not tied to the web resource that you are trying to access. In order to renew id tokens, you need to use acquireTokenSilent with the client-id of your application as the scope. This api will automatically fetch a valid IdToken for you in case of expiration.

If the session is not valid at that point, Msal will throw an error. You can then catch the error & use acquireTokenRedirect() or acquireTokenPopup() for renewing the token. Since the Access token lifetime is 1h, you can also make sure you call the ATS api every hour, to maintain the session.

Please let us know in case you have any further questions.

[DewangS]

Thanks @bmahall for the detailed explanation. For now I’ve just implemented local session management i.e. if the session is idle for a set amount of time, user gets logged out.