Summary

Currently, the BaseSessionBackend handles serialization of custom types (such as Struct, BaseModel etc.) using the type encoders set by the user. However, when it deserializes the data, the user will not get back the types that was initially serialized but only a dictionary. This is a bit inconsistent and removes type safety and other IDE/editor benefits when accessing data from request.session unless they manually convert the returned dictionary into a class or cast it into a TypedDict.

For example,

from msgspec import Struct

class Session(Struct):
    user_id: int
    user_role: Role

async def login(data: Credentials, request: Request, user_service: UserService) -> None:
    user = await user_service.login_user(data)
    
    # Here the `Session` gets serialized properly without issues.
    request.set_session(Session(user.user_id, user.role))
    
async def some_view(request: Request) -> None:
    # Current way since `request.session` returns a `dict[str, Any]` which is
    # due to `BaseSessionBackend.deserialize_data` returning a dictionary.
    session_dict = request.session
    session = Session(**session_dict)
    
    # Proposed way.
    session = request.session
    assert isinstance(session, Session) # True

It would be nice if the session config could be given a type to which the session middleware (or rather, the session backend) would deserialize the session data into.

Basic Example

No response

Drawbacks and Impact

There may be some difficulty in making this backwards compatible if we want to make request.session return a generic type since we would have to add another generic parameter to Request. If this is not possible, users could do something like session = cast(Session, request.session) and the breaking changes could be made in v3. This also may require changes in the API of BaseSessionBackend.deserialize_data to allow it to take a Scope in order to get the type decoders as done in BaseSessionBackend.serialize_data.

Unresolved questions

No response