How to recover from failed session load?

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi,

I am using Rails 6 with Session::CookieStore. I noticed that, whenever something goes wrong during session state loading (e.g., data in the cookie cannot be parsed because storage mode has been switched from Marshal to JSON), Rails raises a hard error (e.g., JSON::ParserError) and fails the request.

Is this expected behaviour? It seems far from optimal to me. Instead, Rails should fail gracefully by re-setting the session if loading fails.

I can implement graceful recovery in the following way:

  before_action :load_session_with_fallback

  def load_session_with_fallback
    # trigger session loading attempt
    session[:foo]
  rescue => e
    logger.error "Session loading failed: " + e.inspect
    #reset_session does not work here! need to manually re-set the session cookie
    cookies[:_forum_session] = nil
    if @retried
      raise e
    else
      @retried = true
      retry
    end
  end

But it seems a bit hacky to re-set the cookie manually (reset_session does not have the intended effect).

Any better suggestion for how to implement graceful recovery for failed session loads? Should this be a standard rails feature?

Thanks, Andreas