Sessions and Users, was: Re: [Pangloss] [RFC] OpenFrame AppKit ideas

[Steve Purkis]

Hi Chris,

On Tuesday, April 8, 2003, at 10:01  am, Chris Croome wrote:

> GET should never change state on the server side, that should be

I'm not sure I want to worry about being REST-compliant...  At any 
rate, it wasn't something I was factoring into the design.


> But perhaps I'm missing something -- what is the idea behind
> sessions?

The idea in general is to have somewhere to store information about the 
current user, their request, etc. without having to worry about passing 
a whole bunch of form parameters back and forth.  How it is used is up 
to the application developer.

 From Pangloss' point of view, consider the multi-faceted navigation.  I 
was thinking of storing the user's "filters" in the session -- so when 
you choose to filter based on a translator's name, that information 
goes into the session.  Same goes for the language, search keywords, 
etc.  In this fashion, you don't need to have hidden form fields for 
each filter you've already selected, which means less work from the 
template writer's side of things, and also means the application 
doesn't need to repeat the same work (constructing the filters) for 
each request.

Hope this helps,
-Steve