How do sessions work?

thefisherman

Hello,

I would like to know how sessions work. I have a commercial website in progress and just thought of how to keep track of who is doing what.

Say, 10 people are selecting thing from the site, how do i store that information into a (for instance) database. And how can i tell what information to put in what datbase?

As you can see, this is quite confusing to me.

Any help would be kindly appreciated.

FIsh

kristianblom

To know how sessions work, there is one thing to do. Read about it. But I can give you a short intro on what a session is.

When you open a browser window and enters the website you start a new session. This session will run until it times out or you close the browser window.

In a session you can store values. That means that you can retrieve these values at any time in the session.

This is not a good explanation at all, but it's a very basic introduction on how you can use sessions.

I've used sessions when creating user areas. It's pretty easy to use and works fine for these kind of things.

What you need to do is to define what you want to keep track. When do you want to write to the database? When the users move around, or on a special action like a form submit?

Anyway sessions are good for this kind of work. There are som goood articles on this site on this subject.

thefisherman

Thnx Kristanblom,

That is a pretty general description.
When i think about what i want, then this is it:

Keep track of users moving around different pages on the site.

that's it.

Because when a user is browsing my database, and for instance adds an item to a cart, i need to know which cart i am adding the item to.

Right now, i have a database to store items in. This works fine. But only when 1 user adds items to it, since there is just 1 database to hold the cart's items.

This is where the session comes in right?

Ok, (a bit) confused here

FiSh

kristianblom

I suppose that what you want is to add items to a basket, bring the "basket" around your site, add and remove content, and then finally by the contents of the basket by submitting.

Keep the basket items stored in a session. On submit you could write to the database. Sessions is the right thing for you here.

Sessions are good!