Redirect as response to Ajax request ends up returning empty - ajax

Question

We are using Primefaces 3M4 and one of our pages has a p:dataTable which uses ajax calls for events:
<p:ajax event="rowSelect" update=":newsForm:newsDlg" oncomplete="newsDlg.show();"/>
When the session times out the page gets redirected to /login.xhtml which works fine for non-ajax actions (menu items, etc) but when I select a row in the datatable after the session has expired the page doesn't change to the login page and in Firebug I see the following:
Under dashboard.xhtml Headers section of Firebug
Response Headers
Server Apache-Coyote/1.1
X-Powered-By JSF/2.0
Location http://localhost:8080/RetailerPortal/faces/login.xhtml
Content-Length 0
Date Fri, 11 Nov 2011 18:32:42 GMT
Request Headers
Host localhost:8080
User-Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:8.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0
Accept application/xml, text/xml, */*; q=0.01
Accept-Language en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding gzip, deflate
Accept-Charset ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Connection keep-alive
Content-Type application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8
Faces-Request partial/ajax
X-Requested-With XMLHttpRequest
Referer http://localhost:8080/RetailerPortal/faces/dashboard.xhtml
Content-Length 389
Cookie csfcfc=_30Xsr; JSESSIONID=fg1bV1sZkzKIgNtkH0bz0N0f; JSESSIONID=C65BF4EED70299ABFE4B73614118295E
Under dashboard.xhtml Response
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='ISO-8859-1'?>
<partial-response><changes><update id="javax.faces.ViewState"><![CDATA[-3728406524126180805:2441995557020829808]]></update></changes></partial-response>
Under dashbaoard.xhtml Post
Parametersapplication/x-www-form-urlencoded
javax.faces.ViewState 7521050094575005695:7928145831130537413
javax.faces.behavior.even... rowSelect
javax.faces.partial.ajax true
javax.faces.partial.event rowSelect
javax.faces.partial.execu... newsForm:newsTable
javax.faces.partial.rende... newsForm:newsDlg
javax.faces.source newsForm:newsTable
newsForm newsForm
newsForm:newsTable_instan... 3
newsForm:newsTable_select... 3
Source
newsForm=newsForm&newsForm%3AnewsTable_selection=3&javax.faces.ViewState=7521050094575005695%3A7928145831130537413&javax.faces.partial.ajax=true&javax.faces.source=newsForm:newsTable&javax.faces.partial.execute=newsForm:newsTable&javax.faces.partial.render=newsForm:newsDlg&javax.faces.behavior.event=rowSelect&javax.faces.partial.event=rowSelect&newsForm:newsTable_instantSelectedRowKey=3
Under login.xhtml's headers
Response Headers
Server Apache-Coyote/1.1
X-Powered-By JSF/2.0
Cache-Control no-cache
Set-Cookie JSESSIONID=MdhyizD+8IkuFvLZD+6jWlUz; Path=/RetailerPortal
Content-Type text/xml;charset=UTF-8
Content-Length 196
Date Fri, 11 Nov 2011 18:32:42 GMT
Request Headers
Host localhost:8080
User-Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:8.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0
Accept application/xml, text/xml, */*; q=0.01
Accept-Language en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding gzip, deflate
Accept-Charset ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Connection keep-alive
Referer http://localhost:8080/RetailerPortal/faces/dashboard.xhtml
X-Requested-With XMLHttpRequest
Faces-Request partial/ajax
Content-Type application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Cookie csfcfc=_30Xsr; JSESSIONID=fg1bV1sZkzKIgNtkH0bz0N0f; JSESSIONID=C65BF4EED70299ABFE4B73614118295E
Under login.xhtml's XML section
XML Parsing Error: no element found Location: moz-nullprincipal:{6ccf85cf-5c69-438c-a9bb-e66423a36a48} Line Number 1, Column 1:
^
Response code
HttpServletResponse servResponse = (HttpServletResponse) response;
servResponse.sendRedirect("login.xhtml");
servResponse.setHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Origin", "*");

Answer 1

Just a guess--
If you're trying to redirect from an ajax response, you can't do that 301/302 style-- you have to send a message back to the browser and have the browser redirect via javascript.
Probably the non-ajax ones are working because they're using 301/302s.

Answer 2

I found the answer to this question in this blog
with the relevant code for at the bottom of the blog post in the doRedirect method.