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Curator shows a modal to logged-in users shortly before their server-side session expires. This prevents embedded content (such as Power BI reports that rely on cached authorization tokens) from quietly breaking when a user has left a page idle for a long time. The warning is enabled automatically for all logged-in users. There is no setting to toggle it on or off — the only thing you control is when it appears, via the session lifetime.

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How it works

The modal has two states:
  1. Warning — appears before the session expires, with two buttons:
    • Continue sends a lightweight request to the server, refreshes the session, and dismisses the modal. If the request fails (session has already expired), the modal switches to the Expired state with a Reload button instead of closing silently.
    • Log Out redirects the user to the logout page.
  2. Expired — if the user does not act in time, the modal switches to an expired state with a single Reload button that refreshes the page so the user can log in again.
The timer also resets automatically whenever the page makes any background request to the server, so users who are actively interacting with Curator (loading dashboards, navigating, etc.) will not see the warning.

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When the warning appears

The warning timing is derived from the session lifetime:

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Configuring the session lifetime

The session lifetime is controlled by the SESSION_LIFETIME value in your .env file, expressed in minutes. The default is 360 minutes (6 hours).
Lowering this value will cause the warning to appear sooner; raising it will delay the warning. Changes take effect on the next request after the configuration cache is cleared.

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Relationship to automatic logout

This feature is separate from Curator’s automatic logout. Both can be active at the same time:
  • Automatic logout tracks user activity in the browser (mouse, keyboard, scrolling). It exists to log out users who have stepped away from their desk.
  • Session expiration warning tracks the server-side session. It exists to warn users whose session is about to expire on the server even though they may still have the page open.

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Browser sleep and session expiry

The warning is driven by timers running in the browser, and browsers pause those timers while the computer is asleep or the laptop lid is closed. The server-side session keeps counting down regardless. If a machine sleeps for longer than the session lifetime, the session ends on the server first, and the warning modal only appears once the machine wakes up and the paused timer catches up — by which point it is too late to extend anything. Clicking Continue in that situation cannot bring the session back. Continue works by sending a lightweight request to the site, and it only switches the modal to the Expired state when that request fails outright. A request made after the session has already ended can still come back as a successful response, so the modal closes as though nothing went wrong even though the user is no longer authenticated. The visible result is that the modal disappears, but embedded content — such as Power BI or Tableau reports — stays blank or broken, and interacting with a report produces the same authorization error again. What to do: if embedded content is still broken after clicking Continue, reload the page manually (press F5 or use the browser’s refresh button). Curator will prompt for login again if needed, and embedded content will load normally once you are signed back in.
This is a limitation of browser timers rather than a fault in the report or the analytics platform. A proactive refresh — clicking Continue while the session is still alive — works seamlessly. Recovering after the machine has slept past the session lifetime always requires a full page reload.