Best way to store small UI user preferences in web app?

javascript jquery web-applications cookies local-storage
wilsonpage picture wilsonpage · Jun 30, 2011 · Viewed 18.8k times · Source

I have a web app I'm developing and quite like the idea that if the user makes changes to the view of the UI (eg. Lists open or closed, certain viewing preferences) those changes remain after they close the browser and visit the web app at a later date.

Possible options I can think of:

  1. Store UI preferences JSON object in cookie.
  2. Use HTML5 local storage (no experience of this)
  3. Store in mySQL database (not keen on storing such trivial data in the DB)

Once stored I will retrieve these preferences when the user returns and set the UI as it was when they last left it.

Does anyone have any experience of this type of feature and can suggest the best method for UI state save and retrieval?

Answer

bhagyas picture bhagyas · Jun 30, 2011

If it's so small you should probably store the UI settings json object in your own database.

That will leave users with less problems at their end, like cache clearance and local storage unsupported browsers.

It will also make it possible for users to use the UI settings across different computers or browsers.

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