BD pressed the little lettered thingies in this order... > Ugh! > > I'm sure this is fairly simple, but I have yet to come up with a way to do > it... > > In a nutshell, our application creates, uses and drops a table while the > user is working on the site. Unfortunately, because of "other > considerations", we can't use a defined temp table - it has to be created > as a regular table. We have a routine in the app that will drop the table > once the user is done with their work, but if they leave for some reason > before they're done, the table is left hanging out there. This wasn't a > problem at first, but we're building up quite a collection of useless > tables right now. > > Is there any way to drop the table automagically when the user leaves > prematurely, either by closing their browser or jumping to another site? I > tried using register_shutdown_function(), but it didn't seem to have any > effect... > > I think, and I know I may be way off base, is that there are a lot of pages > involved in this application, and I'm not sure how to tell the app that the > user is just going from one page to the next or is actually going > bye-bye... > HTTP is stateless (there is no persistent connection between the server and browser), so there is no way for you to tell the difference on the server side whether the user has gone to get coffee, has closed his or her browser or has been abducted by aliens. You can do two things that are rather unreliable: 1) Have a "Log Out" button. This is unreliable because many (most?) people will simply not use it. 2) Use a javascript to detect when the user has gone away. This is unreliable because many people disable javascript or use non-compliant browsers. The only sure way to keep your temp tables at a minimum is to store a creation date or datetime field in the temp table and destroy the table when it has reached a reasonable age. I prefer to run perl scripts from cron to do this and typically choose 48 hours as the time at which I feel that it is safe to assume that the user has abandoned his or her data. Good luck... Christopher Ostmo a.k.a. [EMAIL PROTECTED] AppIdeas.com Innovative Application Ideas Meeting cutting edge dynamic web site needs since the dawn of Internet time (1995) Business Applications: http://www.AppIdeas.com/ Open Source Applications: http://open.AppIdeas.com/ -- PHP Database Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To contact the list administrators, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
