Session metadata

[theangryangel]

Hi,

Love the project and I'm considering ripping out a similar implementation in a project at work for phxauth as it's more complete.

One thing on our design document is some additional session metadata so we can display something akin to https://github.com/blog/1658-view-active-browser-sessions;

• User agent + OS information (if present)
• Original sign in source IP (for geo-lookup purposes)

If I put together a patch, would this be something you'd be interested in pulling in? Currently I'm thinking of morphing the sessions field into an embeds_many

[riverrun]

It would be great to see what ideas you have - about presenting the user device information and about using embeds_many to store the sessions.

[theangryangel]

The initial ideas I had were on reflection perhaps quite naive. I assumed what people might want to store and was thinking of something very simple with fixed fields that I need at work.

The more I've thought about it the better it would be to perhaps slightly alter the sessions map and allow people to store arbitrary data? i.e.

# Adding a 4th optional field to 
Accounts.add_session(user, session_id, System.system_time(:second), %{os: "Linux", source_ip: "1.1.1.1"})

Then in the relevant functions in accounts.ex alter them along the lines of (I realise I'd need to modify more than just this, but I hope you get the idea)

  def add_session(%User{sessions: sessions} = user, session_id, timestamp, metadata) do
    session_data = put_in(metadata[:created_at], timestamp)
    change(user, sessions: put_in(sessions, [session_id], session_data))
    |> Repo.update
end

It's a relatively simple pair of patches, and if it's a concern I guess we could set it up so that it supports both the current sessions map and the proposed one.

Thoughts? :)

[riverrun]

At the moment, I think it would be a good idea for you to experiment with what works for you at work, and then report back. At the very least, it can be something we add to the documentation / wiki.

You might also want to look at the elixir1.5 branch to see the changes (there are not many) that are coming soon (version 2.0).

[riverrun]

I'm going to close this for now, but in version 2.0 - in the example app, I will probably use a separate table for Sessions, and that may provide you with some of the functionality you want.