How to store user preferences in a web app?

Question

hey everyone i would like to know a good software engineering way to store user preferences in a web app. to clarify further, my app has commands that the user can choose, so i added a button that when some commands are selected, these commands are saved as favorites somewhere on the client's machine, that way if user X logs in at anytime he can check his favorite commands and load them automatically..

how to save these commands and where? and taking into consideration that several users using the same computer should not have access to each's favorites, so i want the favorite to be saved based on userID. where and how to save them? cookies? xml? and using php or javascript is better?

thx a lot for your help:)

Answer 1

Most typical would be to store them in a database of some sort on the server side, easily accessable by the UserID. Keep in mind 'preferences' are different from 'state'. State variables are usually stored via whatever cookie mechanism you are using.

Answer 2

The best way to do this is have them log in whenever accessing your site. Then you store all of the preferences on your server and deliver them down through your UI to their browser. This will mean that it doesn't matter what browser/device they happen to be using, their settings will follow them.

I'm not sure I like the idea of modifying someone's "favorites" in their browser. I'm not sure I'd stick with a site that wanted that level of control over my browser.

Now, if you are just talking about having a page on your site that had a list of "favorites", then that's okay. Just keep it server side.

Answer 3

What is your web app using to hold the data on the back-end? Most likely, that is where you will want to store user preferences. Since you will already be accessing that back-end (a database, perhaps?) to authenticate the user for login, retrieving that user's preferences is a simple step from there.

The real story here is that we need more details. Are you storing authentication information in a database, or something else? How are your user sessions stored (i.e., when a user logs in, how does your web app tell that his browser is logged in on subsequent requests)? Your question seems to state this, but to clarify, are these PHP pages containing some amount of Javascript?

Answer 4

Depends on your requirements. You will need to choose either to store user preferences in your database, provided your users authenticate, this is probably preferred solution. But if it meets your requirements you can save user preferences in a cookie.

Here is are javascript functions and jquery plugin with examples on how to work with cookies.