Resuming a participant's session from a different browser/computer: 5pt

Currently a participant is identified by a row in the Participant table. They are expected to participate in the experiment in one continuous session. This continuity is maintained, in part, by the Javascript object dallinger.identity, which stores the current participant ID with other information like worker ID and assignment ID.

It would be very useful for us if a participant could reconnect to a given participant ID from a fresh browser session, maybe on a different computer. This would require supplementing createParticipant with something like loadParticipant, where loadParticipant takes as an argument the participant ID that is meant to be loaded. Like createParticipant, loadParticipant would be responsible for filling in the appropriate information (in particular the participant ID, but maybe also HIT ID, assignment ID etc.) in dlgr.identity. We’d probably want to provide some kind of security measure to stop people from just putting in an arbitrary participant ID of their choice. Maybe the best way to do this is just to use assignmentID, which should be already unique to each participant, and is available already via their customized URL.

For our applications, we’d want to be able to resume a long time after initially starting the experiment, maybe days later.

[alecpm]

@pmcharrison I was thinking the same thing, and that’s an essential part of my implementation plan for #2258. I’ll do the something similar on this one.

[alecpm]

See PR #2321