Session

Prerequisites

Introduction to Spoon

What will you learn?

Store data in a session key
Retrieve data from a session key

Tutorial

Sessions basics

Sessions provide a way to associate information with individual visitors on your website. Each session has a unique identifier to allow communication between server and user. They are commonly used to store data of the users logged-in with your web application.

That data is stored on the server, which is the key difference with cookies; they are stored on the clients machine instead. The functionality is therefor similar with SpoonCookie, both use the same set/get principle:

The example below stores the value 'bar' in a session variable named 'foo'.

// required classes
require_once 'spoon/spoon.php';

// start the session
SpoonSession::start();

// set session variable 'foo' with value 'bar'
SpoonSession::set('foo', 'bar');

The example below retrieves the data stored in the session key named 'foo', if it exists.

// required classes
require_once 'spoon/spoon.php';

// check if the key exists
if(SpoonSession::exists('foo'))
{
    // show the output of get()
    Spoon::dump(SpoonSession::get('foo'));
}

will output:

string(3) "bar"

SpoonSession::exists() accepts multiple keys to look up, but will only return true if all keys in $_SESSION were found.

Destroying a session

To let users log out of your web application, you can use SpoonSession::destroy(). In the example below the session ID will become unavailable after the destroy() occurs because there is no session set. It will return a SpoonSessionException.

// required classes
require_once 'spoon/spoon.php';

// show the session ID
Spoon::dump(SpoonSession::getSessionId(), false);

// destroy session - logs out the user by destroying his/her session
SpoonSession::destroy();

// attempt to show the session ID - this will trigger an exception
Spoon::dump(SpoonSession::getSessionId());