Rails provides a few different ways to work with browser cookies, in addition to the cookies hash that we’ve already read about.
One are the :alert and :notice options that you are allowed to pass to the redirect_to method:
# In a controller action:
redirect_to("/photos", { :notice => "Photo deleted." })
This sets a cookie in the user’s browser that expires after exactly one more request. To access the notice and alert cookies (if present), there are shortcut methods notice and alert available in all view templates:
<p><%= notice %></p>
Usually, we put the above code in the application layout file app/views/layouts/application.html.erb, since we want notice and alert cookies to, if present, be displayed on any page the user might be redirected to.
Typically notice is used to display “everything worked as intended” messages, and alert is used to display “uh oh something didn’t work, please try again” messages. Collectively, these messages are known as flash messages, since they only appear for one page load and then disappear.
Rails provides another hash called session that works very similarly to cookies: we still .store and .fetch key/value pairs with it.
The differences between session and cookies are:
All of the key/value pairs in session are encoded into one long cookie. If you store things in session and then look in Chrome’s developer tools, individual keys will not be visible (the way that they were with cookies). Instead, there will be one long, gibberish-looking cookie. All of the key/value pairs in session are combined and encoded into it.
This is primarily for security. If we’re storing something important (like the ID of the signed in user), we can’t allow users to simply modify it by opening the Developer Tools. session, unlike cookies, is tamper-proof.
session expires when the user quits their browser.session allows you to store more than just Strings as values. You could, for example, store an Array containing the last 10 product IDs that a user looked at.reset_session, which will delete all the key/value pairs that you’ve added. This is a convenient way to “forget” anything you’ve stored about a user, especially when signing them out.Usually, I use cookies while figuring things out (since I can read them in the Dev Tools which makes debugging easier). Then I switch to session.