On Sun, Apr 17, 2011 at 2:03 AM, Greg Skerman <[email protected]> wrote:
> Ok so I want to do something which I would imagine should be fairly straight
> forward with sessions, but can't for the life of me find documentation to
> support it.
>
> Basically I want to be able to store the cake Session token in a cookie,
> then wake the session matching that cookie back up on a subsequent visit.
>
> Imagine the following scenario (not precisely what I'm doing, but a good
> illustration none the less).
>
> User visits an online store, and puts a bunch of items in their shopping
> cart.
> User then decides to leave the store, without going through the checkout
> Weeks later, the user revisits the store
>
> I want to be able to grab the shopping basket that the user had already
> filled (stored in the session when the visited), and wake the session back
> up so they don't have to go and fill their basket back up with stuff again.
>
> I get that I have to somehow store the session token in a cookie, but how do
> i wake expired sessions back up so that the state matches what it was when
> they left the store in the first place?
It's not the session that you want to revive, exactly. A session is
simply some way to save state between page views. In your example that
includes the items that have been added to the cart but that's not the
entirety of the session. In any case, all you want is to get the list
of items chosen. A shopping cart can be as simple as serializing the
item IDs in the session cookie or more complicated, like storing them
in a carts table. Or even the complete item record in a separate
cart_items table, one row for each item. The latter has the benefit
that you need only fetch the records from cart_items, rather then get
the IDs, then make another find on the items table. Probably it would
be fine to just serialize the IDs in the carts table, though.
So you create a SHA1 token (CHAR(40) for your carts table) for each
cart and save that to the session, eg.
$this->Session->write('Cart.token', '...'). But you also write it to a
separate, long-lived cookie (called, eg. CartToken). Each time a user
visits the site, if they have an empty session you look for the
CartToken cookie. If it exists, find the cart record using the token.
If that exists, write the token to the session again.
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