Could `identify()` also read from `localStorage`?

[georgecrawford]

Hi there,

Firstly, thanks for this great service. It's working fantastically well for us.

We have an application which involves a fair bit of user state changing - logging in and out, setting different properties, etc. For each of these changes, we want to identify(user) to get the appropriate feature flags. I'm already bootstrapping from localStorage during initialize(), and I can's see a good reason why the identify() function doesn't also make use of this cache. I'd be happy if identify() used the last-known values from localStorage, whilst in the background loading the fresh values from the network, populating localStorage, and perhaps firing the change event if there's an update.

Could this work? I may well have missed something really obvious, so apologies!

[eli-darkly]

Thanks! That looks reasonable at first glance, and we're going to look into it further.

[georgecrawford]

Thanks Eli. One thought which occurred to me is that I might want to bootstrap the initialize with a JSON object, but for identify to cache in localStorage. So it might be good to separate these two flags, rather than assume that the user wants localStorage backing for both.

[threehams]

localStorage is unavailable (with thrown errors!) from Safari private browsing mode, so safety or a fallback of some kind would be needed.

[eli-darkly]

@threehams We already have logic that deals with the possibility of localStorage being unavailable or throwing errors.