Setting domain session_expiration_time has no effect

[dgradwell-ams]

h3. Rasa Open Source version

3.1.0

h3. Rasa SDK version

No response

h3. Rasa X version

No response

h3. Python version

3.9

h3. What operating system are you using?

Linux

h3. What happened?

Since version 3.1.0, my preference for session_expiration_time (0) under session_config in the domain doesn't seem to be working anymore. The value is always being set to 60, the default.

I've confirmed that this is the actual value in three ways,

Inspecting the result of the API call to [get the domain| https://rasa.com/docs/rasa/pages/http-api#operation/getDomain] of the running bot

Extracting the trained model archive and inspecting the merged domain therein, and

Every 60 minutes of actual inactivity on my session, action_session_start is invoked

This happens whether my domain is contained in a single file or split into multiple files in a directory. I've tried deleting the trained models and the .rasa cache directory and retraining the model to no avail.

Thing is, we have overridden the action_session_start in our project, and it has considerable side effects in our app that are only meant to be run once for each conversation. We cannot call it again -- we don't want sessions to expire.

h3. Command / Request

No response

h3. Relevant log output

No response

h3. Reproduction repository

[https://github.com/dgradwell-ams/rasa-issue-11061| https://github.com/dgradwell-ams/rasa-issue-11061]

[sara-tagger]

Thanks for raising this issue, @mvielkind will get back to you about it soon✨

Please also check out the docs and the forum in case your issue was raised there too 🤗

[rgstephens]

Hi @dgradwell-ams, I can't duplicate this. Just tested session_expiration_time with a value of 3 and the session restarted when I was idle past the three minutes.

[dgradwell-ams]

@rgstephens Try setting it to zero.

[rgstephens]

I tried zero and it worked for me. Started a session, waited more the 60 minutes, entered an utterance and session and slots were still set, no action_session_start.

I wonder if this could be channel specific. What channel are you using? I did my testing with rasa shell.

[dgradwell-ams]

@rgstephens Hey, you might be on to something. We are using custom connectors, but perhaps I missed something when updating.

[dgradwell-ams]

@rgstephens OK, so upon further investigation, we cannot see anything in our custom connector that would indicate how or why the domain session would not be properly setup. It's nearly identical to the example here: https://rasa.com/docs/rasa/connectors/custom-connectors

[dgradwell-ams]

I'll try to setup a reproduction repo.

[dgradwell-ams]

@rgstephens Here's a repo that reproduces the issue https://github.com/dgradwell-ams/rasa-issue-11061

I've set the expiration time to 1 minute in the configuration to demonstrate easily. See the README.

[benos]

I also have the issue. The entire session_config seems to be ignored. I doubt that it is related to the connector since it seems to get baked into the model at training time.

Here is my config:

And here is the metadata.json of the trained model:

[benos]

I'm wondering if this file has anything to do with it:

https://github.com/RasaHQ/rasa/blob/e9e99c31fabaa04e9f93942cec93abc33bde5218/rasa/graph_components/providers/domain_for_core_training_provider.py

[benos]

Note that if I hack the metadata.json in the trained model then things behave as expected.