I'm facing an issue where I need to communicate with my Node.js server, as well as with my Socket.IO instance. That part works but I also need to access the sessions I have created with Express, even inside the Socket.IO listeners. To achieve that, I'm using express-socket.io-session. It technically works but not the way I want it to. When I make changes to the session, I use req.session.save(function(err) {}) to make sure it really is saved. I use socket.handshake.session.save(function(err) {}) inside the Socket.IO listeners as well. The sessions are saved but I noticed that while the session can be accessed as intended outside the listeners, using them inside any of my Socket.IO listeners isn't that... easy. They are unsynchronized. For example, if I run req.session.user = "abc", it will appear as undefined in a Socket.IO listener... unless I refresh the page. Thanks to that discovery and a few answers here, I realised that disconnecting and connecting Socket.IO from the client-side fixes this. But I'm not sure if that would be the best solution to the problem. Despite the fact that it works, there are scenarios where I can't just keep disconnecting and connecting again and again. After another... session of looking for solutions, I tried using socket.handshake.session.reload(function(err) {}) before doing anything else. Oddly enough, I think it sometimes does work. But even if that's true, the session remains with that undefined value most of the time. I use the following configuration:

var session = require("express-session")({
    // ...
    resave: false,
    saveUninitialized: false
});

I tried to use saveUninitialized: true instead and it seemed like it did synchronise the sessions but it did not respond to scenarios where the user had deleted their cookies manually, through the browser. In such a case, the session should really appear as undefined. And it does... just not inside the listeners. The documentations also say that using true has been deprecated.

I'm stuck with this issue and despite giving my best to find a solution, I couldn't. Are there other methods I can try?