Forcing a reload for all user sessions

Rails
1

I’m storing some user info in session (like the name, using cookies), in
Ruby on Rails 3.2

  • Let’s suppose the user opens the site in two different browsers,
    and
    logs in.
  • He changes his name in one browser, and switches to the other
    browser
    and refreshes the page.
  • The second browser still shows the old name, because it is stored
    in
    session.

How can I force a refresh in all sessions? Is this possible?

2

On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 4:53 AM, David M [email protected] wrote:

I’m storing some user info in session (like the name, using cookies), in
Ruby on Rails 3.2

Let’s suppose the user opens the site in two different browsers, and logs
He changes his name in one browser, and switches to the other browser and
refreshes the page. The second browser still shows the old name, because
it is stored in session.

How can I force a refresh in all sessions? Is this possible?

IMO it’s on the user at that point. Don’t muddle yourself with
details like that when it’s their own problem and something that would
require (possibly depending on how you go about it) significant code
changes that could drastically affect performance.

Depending on how you go about it anyways, normally you would hit the
database everytime anyways and later with some clever side jobs to
pull and commit and update cached records later (or other ways it
really depends on the developer,) why not just use the ActiveRecord
object you pull and show their name? There are cases where you
wouldn’t do that but such as a userless site that just stores their
name in a cookie to preference the site but you can’t really control
that situation at all.

What I am saying is there are several ways you can go about it, one is
to switch to ActiveRecord sessions and add an extra key (“username”)
that is only used to find and delete sessions when a user updates
their record, this would kill all possible sessions but adds extra
overhead in terms of the username and even extra overhead in terms of
ActiveRecord (but then again this is more secure and you could even
get clever and pull from Memcached and delay the commit and memcached
update with delayed_job reducing impact on the user.)

The third way would be to just update the session when you pull their
record from ActiveRecord based on their user_id in the session which
is just as well the same as just using the ActiveRecord object, except
in that case you reduce your code count a littlebit because then you
don’t need to update the session.

Maybe somebody else has better ideas but this is what comes up in my
head.