Функции для работы с сессиями
Be aware of the fact that absolute URLs are NOT automatically rewritten to contain the SID.
Of course, it says so in the documentation (‘Passing the Session Id’) and of course it makes perfectly sense to have that restriction, but here’s what happened to me:
I have been using sessions for quite a while without problems. When I used a global configuration file to be included in all my scripts, it contained a line like this:
which was used to make sure that all automatically generated links had the right prefix (just like $cfg[‘PmaAbsoluteUri’] works in phpMyAdmin). After introducing that variable, no link would pass the SID anymore, causing every script to return to the login page. It took me hours (!!) to recognize that this wasn’t a bug in my code or some misconfiguration in php.ini and then still some more time to find out what it was. The above restriction had completely slipped from my mind (if it ever was there. )
Skipping the ‘http:’ did the job.
OK, it was my own mistake, of course, but it just shows you how easily one can sabotage his own work for hours. Just don’t do it 😉
Sessions and browser’s tabs
May you have noticed when you open your website in two or more tabs in Firefox, Opera, IE 7.0 or use ‘Control+N’ in IE 6.0 to open a new window, it is using the same cookie or is passing the same session id, so the another tab is just a copy of the previous tab. What you do in one will affect the another and vice-versa. Even if you open Firefox again, it will use the same cookie of the previous session. But that is not what you need mostly of time, specially when you want to copy information from one place to another in your web application. This occurs because the default session name is «PHPSESSID» and all tabs will use it. There is a workaround and it rely only on changing the session’s name.
Put these lines in the top of your main script (the script that call the subscripts) or on top of each script you have:
if( version_compare ( phpversion (), ‘4.3.0’ )>= 0 ) <
if(! ereg ( ‘^SESS1+$’ , $_REQUEST [ ‘SESSION_NAME’ ])) <
$_REQUEST [ ‘SESSION_NAME’ ]= ‘SESS’ . uniqid ( » );
>
output_add_rewrite_var ( ‘SESSION_NAME’ , $_REQUEST [ ‘SESSION_NAME’ ]);
session_name ( $_REQUEST [ ‘SESSION_NAME’ ]);
>
?>
How it works:
First we compare if the PHP version is at least 4.3.0 (the function output_add_rewrite_var() is not available before this release).
After we check if the SESSION_NAME element in $_REQUEST array is a valid string in the format «SESSIONxxxxx», where xxxxx is an unique id, generated by the script. If SESSION_NAME is not valid (ie. not set yet), we set a value to it.
uniqid(») will generate an unique id for a new session name. It don’t need to be too strong like uniqid(rand(),TRUE), because all security rely in the session id, not in the session name. We only need here a different id for each session we open. Even getmypid() is enough to be used for this, but I don’t know if this may post a treat to the web server. I don’t think so.
output_add_rewrite_var() will add automatically a pair of ‘SESSION_NAME=SESSxxxxx’ to each link and web form in your website. But to work properly, you will need to add it manually to any header(‘location’) and Javascript code you have, like this:
The last function, session_name() will define the name of the actual session that the script will use.
So, every link, form, header() and Javascript code will forward the SESSION_NAME value to the next script and it will know which is the session it must use. If none is given, it will generate a new one (and so, create a new session to a new tab).
May you are asking why not use a cookie to pass the SESSION_NAME along with the session id instead. Well, the problem with cookie is that all tabs will share the same cookie to do it, and the sessions will mix anyway. Cookies will work partially if you set them in different paths and each cookie will be available in their own directories. But this will not make sessions in each tab completly separated from each other. Passing the session name through URL via GET and POST is the best way, I think.
session_destroy
session_destroy() destroys all of the data associated with the current session. It does not unset any of the global variables associated with the session, or unset the session cookie. To use the session variables again, session_start() has to be called.
Note: You do not have to call session_destroy() from usual code. Cleanup $_SESSION array rather than destroying session data.
In order to kill the session altogether, the session ID must also be unset. If a cookie is used to propagate the session ID (default behavior), then the session cookie must be deleted. setcookie() may be used for that.
When session.use_strict_mode is enabled. You do not have to remove obsolete session ID cookie because session module will not accept session ID cookie when there is no data associated to the session ID and set new session ID cookie. Enabling session.use_strict_mode is recommended for all sites.
Immediate session deletion may cause unwanted results. When there is concurrent requests, other connections may see sudden session data loss. e.g. Requests from JavaScript and/or requests from URL links.
Although current session module does not accept empty session ID cookie, but immediate session deletion may result in empty session ID cookie due to client(browser) side race condition. This will result that the client creates many session ID needlessly.
To avoid these, you must set deletion time-stamp to $_SESSION and reject access while later. Or make sure your application does not have concurrent requests. This applies to session_regenerate_id() also.
Parameters
This function has no parameters.
The SessionHandler class
SessionHandler is a special class that can be used to expose the current internal PHP session save handler by inheritance. There are seven methods which wrap the seven internal session save handler callbacks ( open , close , read , write , destroy , gc and create_sid ). By default, this class will wrap whatever internal save handler is set as defined by the session.save_handler configuration directive which is usually files by default. Other internal session save handlers are provided by PHP extensions such as SQLite (as sqlite ), Memcache (as memcache ), and Memcached (as memcached ).
When a plain instance of SessionHandler is set as the save handler using session_set_save_handler() it will wrap the current save handlers. A class extending from SessionHandler allows you to override the methods or intercept or filter them by calls the parent class methods which ultimately wrap the internal PHP session handlers.
This allows you, for example, to intercept the read and write methods to encrypt/decrypt the session data and then pass the result to and from the parent class. Alternatively one might chose to entirely override a method like the garbage collection callback gc .
Because the SessionHandler wraps the current internal save handler methods, the above example of encryption can be applied to any internal save handler without having to know the internals of the handlers.
To use this class, first set the save handler you wish to expose using session.save_handler and then pass an instance of SessionHandler or one extending it to session_set_save_handler() .
Please note that the callback methods of this class are designed to be called internally by PHP and are not meant to be called from user-space code. The return values are equally processed internally by PHP. For more information on the session workflow, please refer to session_set_save_handler() .