Question

I have an application that has different data sets depending on which company the user has currently selected (dropdown box on sidebar currently used to set a session variable).

My client has expressed a desire to have the ability to work on multiple different data sets from a single browser simultaneously. Hence, sessions no longer cut it.

Googling seems to imply get or post data along with every request is the way, which was my first guess. Is there a better/easier/rails way to achieve this?

Answer 1

You have a few options here, but as you point out, the session system won’t work for you since it is global across all instances of the same browser.

The standard approach is to add something to the URL that identifies the context in which to execute. This could be as simple as a prefix like /companyx/users instead of /users where you’re fetching the company slug and using that as a scope. Generally you do this by having a controller base class that does this work for you, then inherit from that for all other controllers that will be affected the same way.

Another approach is to move the company identifying component from the URL to the host name. This is common amongst software-as-a-service providers because it makes sharding your application much easier. Instead of myapp.com/companyx/users you’d have companyx.myapp.com/users. This has the advantage of preserving the existing URL structure, and when you have large amounts of data, you can partition your app by customer into different databases without a lot of headache.

The answer you found with tagging all the URLs using a GET token or a POST field is not going to work very well. For one, it’s messy, and secondly, a site with every link being a POST is very annoying to work with as it makes navigating with the back-button or forcing a reload troublesome. The reason it has seen use is because out of the box PHP and ASP do not have support routes, so people have had to make do.