As I learn Rails I find myself all too often tempted to dump something into the session hash just because I can't think of a better way to make it briefly persistent (no oxymoron intended!).
For instance, I have report that allows all sorts of changes by the user. He can set filters on the data, sort it in different ways, and so on. Different Actions get involved, but each of them needs to see the underlying data. It makes things a lot easier if they can just pull it from the session. But I always feel a little bit 'dirty' in doing so.
How do others handle these sorts of things?
-George