Session looses state when changing browsers

[ijiraq]

This issue reports a design flaw rather than bug.

The current implementation uses browser storage for state. This creates a conflict as moving from one browser/client to another looses the state of session. The sessions should keep their state info, doing so allows users to come back to their work at any browser and to share the URL of the session to share a result / demo.

Using the browser storage is fragile (see issue #2 ) and will be a problem as complexity increases.

[BearBearCodes]

Good suggestion. I agree that the ETC should preserve state between sessions and between browsers. I had never thought about sharing the URL of the session before, but you make a good point.

One way of preserving state is to store the session parameters on the Flask server. Then if the session storage for a certain element is empty, try and load the data from the Flask server. If we do this when the page loads, we should only have to do this once and not have to keep re-sending requests to the backend every time the frontend needs to re-render data.