I need a way of being able to do the following:
A web application has a variable called ‘setting’.
When a user first connects to the application, setting should have a value of ‘default’.
Setting can be changed in any page.
If a user middle-clicks to open a page in a new tab, that page’s setting should be a copy of the current page’s setting (a copy, not a reference to it).
If a user opens a new tab and types in the web app’s URL, then that page’s value of setting should be ‘default’.
If a user left clicks a link, then the new page should have the same value for setting as the referring page (the same value, not a copy).
Implementation:
I can obviously do this with a nasty url hack (…?setting=foo), but this gets nasty when there are many settings.
Is there any ‘per-tab’ storage available on browsers.
Theory:
The theoretical underpinning for this behaviour is the concept of a subsession. All subsessions belong to the session. Subsessions have a parent, if their tab was opened by a middle click. If their page loaded by typing a URL in an empty tab, then the subsession has no parent. Settings can be stored in subsessions, and is a setting is not present in a subsession, the parent’s value is used instead.
Has anyone got any ideas on how to do this nicely?
Are there any sites which already behave this way?
Thanks,
Chris.
I have written a solution to this issue at:
https://github.com/chrisdew/subsession
It is obviously in early development and may contain bugs.