Newbie question; best way to store simple session data?

Rails
1

As a first test project, I’m writing a little Rails app that simply
lets one browse the directory structure on the server. (Obviously,
this isn’t intended for public deployment :slight_smile: ). One thing that needs
to be stored in a session is the currently browsed directory. What’s
the best way to store such simple data? (I sorta think a database
table is overkill :slight_smile: )

Thanks,
Ken

2

ken wrote:

As a first test project, I’m writing a little Rails app that simply
lets one browse the directory structure on the server. (Obviously,
this isn’t intended for public deployment :slight_smile: ). One thing that needs
to be stored in a session is the currently browsed directory. What’s
the best way to store such simple data? (I sorta think a database
table is overkill :slight_smile: )

Store it in a cookie.

–
Michael W.

3

Rails has a session management mechanism already built for you. Just
use that. Store your value in the session hash then you can just
configure Rails to store sessions either in a file (the default) or in
the database if you prefer that.

Excerpt from Agile Web D. with Rails page 105:

By default, Rails stores session information in a file on the server.
If you have
a single Rails server running, there’s no problem with this. But
imagine that
your store application gets so wildly popular that you run out of
capacity on a
single-server machine and need to run multiple boxes. The first
request from
a particular user might be routed to one back-end machine, but the
second
request might go to another. The session data stored on the first
server isn’t
available on the second; the user will get very confused as items
appear and
disappear in their cart across requests.

If you choose to store session data in the database just do this:
depot> rake db:sessions:create
exists db/migrate
create db/migrate/004_add_sessions.rb
depot> rake db:migrate

And here’s a sample of storing an object in the session:

def find_cart
unless session[:cart] # if there’s no cart in the
session
session[:cart] = Cart.new # add a new one
end
session[:cart] # return existing or new cart
end