Effective Session Management in Phoenix LiveView Applications

The content provides a detailed exploration of how to implement robust session management in a Phoenix LiveView application. It describes the necessity of preserving user selections (like division filters) across different views and even after app deployments. The author outlines the shortcomings of various common approaches, including the use of assigns and session cookies, ultimately deciding on a dual approach that combines a cookie-based session with an ETS (Erlang Term Storage) table. This solution allows data to persist across user sessions and survive application restarts while being fast enough for use during live view navigation. Technical details include modifications to the router pipeline to fetch the current division from cache or session, and the creation of a genserver to manage settings in the ETS table. The article also includes sample code implementations for managing user data and session updates effectively, and concludes with a reflection on the complexity of global state management in web applications.