How to avoid creating new session when hash in URL changes

[Daniel15]

I have a site that makes use of the part of the URL after the # to store the app's current state to allow the browser back and forward buttons to work. This can change quite frequently. Sentry appears to be treating these as navigation events, as I see two API calls whenever it changes:

{"sent_at":"2023-11-23T03:58:03.993Z","sdk":{"name":"sentry.javascript.react","version":"7.81.1"}}
{"type":"session"}
{"sid":"xxxx","init":false,"started":"2023-11-23T03:57:58.415Z","timestamp":"2023-11-23T03:58:03.993Z","status":"exited","errors":0,"attrs":{"release":"xxxx","environment":"production","user_agent":"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:120.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/120.0"}}

and:

{"sent_at":"2023-11-23T03:58:03.993Z","sdk":{"name":"sentry.javascript.react","version":"7.81.1"}}
{"type":"session"}
{"sid":"xxxx","init":true,"started":"2023-11-23T03:58:03.993Z","timestamp":"2023-11-23T03:58:03.993Z","status":"ok","errors":0,"attrs":{"release":"xxxx","environment":"production","user_agent":"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:120.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/120.0"}}

Is there a way to disable this?

[Daniel15]

Looks like there's no way to turn off session tracking for navigation:

sentry-javascript/packages/browser/src/sdk.ts

Lines 262 to 268 in 08818d8

	// We want to create a session for every navigation as well
	addHistoryInstrumentationHandler(({ from, to }) => {
	// Don't create an additional session for the initial route or if the location did not change
	if (from !== undefined && from !== to) {
	startSessionOnHub(getCurrentHub());
	}
	});

Turning off all session tracking using autoSessionTracking works, but that also disables session tracking for the initial page load.

Looks like this was previously discussed in #5379, so I'll ping that issue.

[lforst]

Just to confirm, are the sids different from eachother?

[Daniel15]

Yes, a different sid each time.

For now I've just disabled auto session tracking.

[AbhiPrasad]

Hey @Daniel15 - does #7692 work for your case?