Storing Temporary Form Data

irbrian

In the heavy-weight, security-conscious PHP application I'm building, there is a frequent need to store data across several forms before it is eventually stored in a MySQL database table. Common solutions seem to be to store the data in the Session or to write it to a temporary holding place in the database. But I have issues with both -- sessions are finicky and have an annoying (but highly necessary) tendency to expire, and storing data in the database means that I'd have to create a database table for each set of forms.

My proposed solution is to create server-side temporary files, referenced by the user's session ID, that can store data dynamically as variable=value pairs. But I'm not sure if this is the best solution. Is there anyone out there who's done something like this before?

Drakla

What you're proposing is exactly what sessions do already - that's pretty much exactly how they work.

Why do you say they're finicky? People who grizzle about sessions usually haven't just sat down and wrote a few test scripts to realise that there is absolutely nothing complex about them in the slightest.

If you're the controller of the big picture in this project you could also set the session timeout time to something huge, just in case the 24 minutes default is not temporary enough.

irbrian

Sessions are for security, and I need to keep it that way. I need to have a method for storing data that I have complete control over, independent of sessions.

For instance, in one area I may need to have temporary form data that lasts for 24 hours, but I certainly don't want the user's session lasting that long. Elsewhere, I'll need the data to last for not a particular length of time, but for roughly three "actions" (page-loads within a site section).

Instead of files, though, I came up with a method for storing dynamic temporary data in the database which meets these requirements. It can be used to maintain data for X number of sessions, and/or for a configurable maximum duration, and can be updated & used on the fly (within a single instance of the app). It's probably not the most efficient system, but it's served me very well so far, despite the need for a bit more tweaking.