Question

Have an ajax call to “updateUser” which does this:

puts session[:user_id]
user = User.find(params[:user_id])
if user
  session[:user_id] = user.id
  session[:user_name] = user.first_name + " " + user.last_name
  puts session[:user_id]
  render text => "Success.
end

The first puts shows the original user_id and the second shows the new user_id, so it would appear to be working properly. However, when I navigate to another page, all the session information is still that of the original user_id. What have I done wrong?

I have a feeling it has something to do with the local session cookie not being updated.

UPDATE

Definitely has something to do with caching. I can go to the page, clear the browser cache (am using Chrome as my browser), then run the ajax call and it works properly once. After that I am locked in to the (new) old user again.

UPDATE 2

Looks like it is something specifically to do with html5 application-cache. If I kill the appcache or run the script from a page that does not include manifest it works just fine. Still can’t get it working properly on the cached page.

The same session id is being sent to the server from the cached page as the non-cached page, and the response headers are identical. But each request from the locally cached page causes the server to start with old session information.

Answer 1

The problem is that the session information is stuffed inside the application cache somewhere, All requests sent to the server are sent using that session info (which was cached on page load). So, we need to update the application cache with window.applicationCache.update() after the successful ajax call. This will cause the next request sent to the server to have the updated session information and all is well.

$.ajax({url: "/contoller/update_logged_user",
  data: {id: user_id},
  success:function(){
    window.applicationCache.update();
  }})