How to replace session with stateless rest apis? - api

Question

So, I am trying to make a shopping cart web architecture on rest framework where I am struggling to use browser storages to use as an alternative to maintaining the state.
I tried the window.localStorage and window.sessionStorage() APIs but it failed in the case of the private browsing mode in Safari and Opera.
So can anyone help out in the figuring other methods by which I can maintain states in rest based architecture?

Answer 1

You don't need sessions to store application state. User resources.
On approach would be to model every shopping cart as a resource with a unique ID:
/shop/shoppingcarts/E73AC56C-BDF7-11E5-81F1-8E2EDB915C80
The client application in the browser would read this resource:
GET /shop/shoppingcarts/E73AC56C-BDF7-11E5-81F1-8E2EDB915C80
It would add an item to the cart:
POST /shop/shoppingcarts/E73AC56C-BDF7-11E5-81F1-8E2EDB915C80/items
{
"itemId": "1234",
"quantity": 1
}
It would list the contents of the shopping cart:
GET /shop/shoppingcarts/E73AC56C-BDF7-11E5-81F1-8E2EDB915C80/items
[
{
"itemId": "1234",
"title": "Some nice item",
"quantity": 1,
"price", 12.34,
"priceTotal": 12.34
},
{
"itemId": "9876",
"title": "Some other nice item",
"quantity": 2,
"price", 0.99,
"priceTotal": 1.98
}
]
The web application would remove an item from the cart:
DELETE /shop/shoppingcarts/E73AC56C-BDF7-11E5-81F1-8E2EDB915C80/items/9876
I think you get the idea.