part_3.md

Part 3: Remember the sorting and filtering settings (70 points)

OK, so the user can now click on the "Movie Title" or "Release Date" headings and see movies sorted by those columns, and can additionally use the checkboxes to restrict the listing to movies with certain ratings only. And we have preserved RESTfulness, because the URI itself always contains the parameters that will control sorting and filtering.

The last step is to remember these settings. That is, if the user has selected any combination of column sorting and restrict-by-rating constraints, and then the user clicks to see the details of one of the movies (for example), when she clicks the Back to Movie List on the detail page, the movie listing should "remember" her sorting and filtering settings from before.

(Clicking away from the list to see the details of a movie is only one example; the settings should be remembered regardless what actions the user takes, so that any time she visits the index page, the settings are correctly reinstated.)

The best way to do the "remembering" will be to use the session[] hash. The session is like the flash[], except that once you set something in the session[] it is remembered "forever" until you nuke the session with session.clear or selectively delete things from it with session.delete(:some_key). That way, in the index method, you can selectively apply the settings from the session[] even if the incoming URI doesn’t have the appropriate params[] set.

Hints and caveats

If the user explicitly includes new sorting/filtering settings in params[], the session should not override them. Instead, these new settings should be remembered in the session.

If a user unchecks all checkboxes, use the settings stored in the session[] hash, since it doesn't make sense for a user to uncheck all the boxes.

To be RESTful, we want to preserve the property that a URI that results in a sorted/filtered view always contains the corresponding sorting/filtering parameters. Therefore, if you find that the incoming URI is lacking the right params[] and you're forced to fill them in from the session[], the RESTful thing to do is to redirect_to the new URI containing the appropriate parameters. There is an important corner case to keep in mind here, though: if the previous action had placed a message in the flash[] to display after a redirect to the movies page, your additional redirect will delete that message and it will never appear, since the flash[] only survives across a single redirect. To fix this, use flash.keep right before your additional redirect.

When you're done with this part

Deploy to Heroku by following the same process as before:

$ git commit -am "part 3 complete"
$ git push heroku master

For Berkeley students, please push your code to your remote repository:

$ git push origin master

Next: Submission