Sessions with SPA application and API

Question

We are using ASP CORE 2.x (API) with a SPA (ReactJS), I need to know what is the best strategy to track users sessions. The issue is mainly for unauthenticated users, let say we have a shopping cart. The cart is stored in the database, how do you keep the cart items of a guest user? When a guess leaves the site and comes back, we need to show the cart items.

I was planning to have a session generate by the server and saving it to the client side (in a cookie), but this means that I need to call a “ensure” session on from the client site to the server… and keeping track of the session in the db.

Any alternative or suggestions?

Answer 1

You can persist the shopping cart items to localStorage, and then when the user comes back just rehydrate it. I would recommend redux-persist if you use redux.

Answer 2

I would associate the cart of the guest to a generated guid stored with the cart (ID?}. Passing this through cookies, the next time the guest comes, if the cookie exists and refers to a cart, I reload it. You can set some timestamp to clean pending cart on a regular base from your DB.