session handling in php4 sucks?

Anon

hello,

Does anyone know if the session handling in php4 provides a
session_on_end function that is executed automatically at the
destruction of the session, or something similar?
If not, how can you eg. write session variables to the database when
someones browser crashes? (= can you create a professional ecommerce
site with php or not!?) Thanx,

werner

Anon

It sounds to me like you don't have any idea what PHP sessions are.

I suggest you read the manual first, then decide if PHP sessions suck or not.

Anon

i DO know how php sessions work, i'm just not one of those guys who don't want to admit it has failures. And i have read the manual for about 10 times, and pretty sure by now that there is no functionality as described in my question (which obtw there is in IIS, but i don't want to end up in an php-asp discussion). If you're so sure about php sessions, why don't you just explain how i can write session variables to a database when the browser crashes?

werner

Anon

You don't.
PHP is not a resident program like IIS.
The big advantage of PHP sessions is that they last longer than one browse by the user, they don't have to time-out after 10 minutes.

But if you really want to I guess you should log the created SessionsID's to your database and check which ones are still available after X minutes. Those could be considered "crashed" and can then be stored in the database.

Anon

I too would like to see an on_session_timeout() function. Thinking of the what needs to be done to make this work for now, the answer might be to do something like store in each session a copy of something like $PHP_AUTH_USER or something else that has the username in it. Then write a little utility page that allows the users to browse previously unclosed sessions and resume them.

colin

How can you check which sessions are still available after X minutes.

How can you see othere sessIDs from another.

OR are you talking about manually parsing the session file/(db table)?

thanks,

colin