How to delete sessions when user leaves?

Archbob

How do you delete a specific session when a user leaves or closes your page. Will:

if(connection_aborted)
{
   session_destroy();
}

Work?

stolzyboy

you can do it with a link, like if you go to logout.php simply do the session_destroy(), etc...and if they close their browser window that will kill the session also

Archbob

Yeah, I know but I need it to delete the session in the database:

like will:

if(connection_aborted)
{
$s="DELETE from sessions where name='$sessionname'";
mysql_query($s);
}

work?

stolzyboy

well you never said that, and yes, if they click a link to logout, that would do it, but it won't if they just close the browser, obviously

Archbob

So how you you do it where it would delete if they just closed the browser or if they went to another page?

Weedpacket

Presumably when the php.ini-configured garbage collector says to delete it ... what it would do depends on you wrote for the handler.
There is of course nothing stopping you from using connection_aborted() as well, but that won't tell you if they just wandered off to another page, only that they aborted loading the current one.

DeltaRho2K

I guess the important question would be...

Why are you keeping track of the session in a database to begin with?

I mean, if you are using sessions, then you have your way of tracking the user... There really is no need to keep track of the session variables in a database too... (unless you are collecting the info for some purpose, in which case, why delete the record from the database?)

You can't delete the record from the DB if they just close their browser at all (technically).

You could add some javascript to run a popup upon the page closing, and script the popup page to do the deletion. That's about the only way you could do it without clicking a link...

Archbob

I want a way to track and display what user sessions are running on the server, like display whose logged on like vB.

jcantrell

I do what you are talking about on my site. Here is what I do.

in the footer of every page, I have a little script that:

Inputs the username, the timestamp, and the url they are currently accessing.
Deletes * from the database where timestamp > 20 minutes.

That allows me to completely track the users as they move through the site. I'm acutally sitting here tracking users on our main site, and our demo site as I am writing this.

You could really do this with your current setup, but storing a timestamp in every row that gets put into your database, and each time a user accesses your page, the will automatically clean up the table.

Let me know if this helps.