Is there a compelling reason to prefer reliance on the params hash vs.
the same info stored in a session hash? So, for example, params[:id] =
@loan vs. session[:loan_id] = @loan.id? It matters because I can make
prettier urls if I store certain uniquely identifying model attributes
as session variables.
The drawback I can think of in preferring session variables to the
params hash is that a user cannot be guaranteed to recover via the
same url the same model instance under the session-preferred approach,
because the session variable may have changed.
Server farms are one reason, but with cookie-based session store, it's not that big a deal. The other reason that comes to mind is Web crawling. Relying on session state often defeats Web crawlers, although that does not seem like it's relevant to the example you gave. Why can't you make load_id part of the URL using routing?
I'm persisting a 'transitional' object through a few views, spawning
descendants from it and then deleting the parent object. In this case,
then, it doesn't seem to make sense to publicize a reference to the
transitional object in a url because the referenced object will not be
persisted indefinitely -- indeed its creation should be silent to the
user.
