Having developed J2EE Struts apps in WebSPhere for a couple of years, when I
 move to portal, I have run into an issue:

How to access shared common data?

We are developing a portal for a financial services firm. In addition to LDA
P based security, there is user information in the database that we want to 
be able to aggregate with some of the LDAP group data, and make available to
 the various portlets. This includes account data that restricts the user's 
view of data, user profile information, role information, etc.

Typically, we would extend the Struts controller to gather all relevant data
 and put into a session object., which would be available to all action clas
ses.

However, with Portal 5, the HTTP Session does not seen to be available. 
The Portlet Session is per portlet, if we were to create a singleton with a 
static hashmap, it wouldn't be available between portlets, because each Port
let is in a separate classloader (I think???)

the portal user profile seems to be only data that is defined in wmm.xml, et
c. etc. 

This all makes for a very fragmented and inefficient approach to session dat
a. 

Has anyone come up with a mechanism for sharing session level data?

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