[Web-SIG] Session interface

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 05:08 PM 8/16/2005 -0400, Geoffrey Talvola wrote:
>Jonathan Ellis wrote:
> > Still, it can be good to have a simple place to store non-permanent
> > information.
>
>For example...
>
>I think a good use of sessions is in remembering selections that have been
>made earlier on.  For example, suppose you have a reporting application
>where you allow the user to select one or more items to report on from a
>list box, several filtering options in dropdowns or checkboxes, sorting and
>grouping behavior, etc.  You want to remember those settings so that if the
>user returns to the report selection page, their last selected settings are
>pre-selected.  But, unless the user chooses to save those settings as a
>"stored report", you'd like to forget the settings when the user logs out or
>when they close their browser.
>
>Also, assume that your application already has this bundle of selections in
>the form of a Python object.
>
>Isn't the cleanest, easiest, and more efficient way to handle this to simply
>save the Python object in a session variable?

No.  :)

I have to admit I'm probably biased by early Zope experience, where cookie 
variables are as easy to use as form variables or any other kind of 
variable.  Just set the cookies to save the options, then refer to them in 
the page.  Sweet and simple.  And if you set the cookie path to the path of 
the page, then the client doesn't have to send them on every request, only 
the ones where it makes a difference.


>   In some cases, for example
>using Webware's in-memory sessions, for example, this data never has to be
>marshaled or leave the application server at all.
>
>If I didn't have sessions, I think using either cookies or a back-end db
>would be more work, less clean, and less efficient in this case.

Maybe that's a limitation of the framework?  As I said, I'm probably 
spoiled by how easily Zope merges GET/POST/cookie variables, such that form 
variables override cookies, but if the form variable isn't supplied the 
cookie is used as a default.  That one simple behavior made "smart forms" 
really easy to make in Zope and Zope-like systems.