> On 19-Jun-2006 12:51:38, firebird-php@yahoogroups.com wrote:
> I am re-visiting this and trying to get php to use firebird for
> storing php sessions.
>
> There are plenty of exmaples of the various php functions required for
> MySQL but I haven't found anything yet done in Firebird. Anyway, I
> have created a set of functions i.e. sessionOpen, sessionClose,
> sessionRead etc.. as best I can, but I don't think I've even got past
> php recognising the Firebird database and table as the storage as I'm
> getting the error "Failed to initialize storage module".
>
> Firstly, in php.ini, I am wondering how exactly to specify the
> "session.save_path" and "session.name" configs. Would
> "/opt/firebird/city/city.fdb" and "tblphpsessions" be valid (e.g. is
> the .fdb suffix required or not?.
>
> There are more questions to follow to get this working I'm sure, but
> i'll leave it there to see whether anybody has done this successfully
> or not.

As your request is a little vague, I'm going to make some assumptions, so
forgive me if I'm wrong on this but at least it will allow you to expand on
your requirements and I'll share how we are doing this sort of thing.

When you say 'Sessions', I'm assuming you are referring to 'Server Side
Sessions' rather than client sessions. In PHP, a session is typically a
client side session, that can be pulled from the browser and referenced
through an array structure. My guess is that you want to use the client
session ID as a key reference in Firebird for something, and possibly the
other array elements for something to be persistently stored. The problem
with this approach is that the client's session expires when they close
their browser session, etc. So the persistence of this data would have to
take that into consideration.

What we do with this, which works great, is to use the Session handling of
PHP in conjunction with a MVC framework. We use Code Igniter
(www.codeigniter.com) and have modified it to use Firebird as our database
of choice. We don't use their DB models but use our own. However there is
an extension to CI's session handling, called PHPSession that has much
richer functionality for this.

In practice, our use of this is to put a 'user no', for example, in the
browser session of a client after they authenticate. For each page request
that comes back in from that browser, we check the user no against our
registered user table. If a user's ability to access the system expires, or
changes, because we use a MVC approach and all incoming requests go through
a Controller in PHP, it's the controller that redirects the user out of the
system and kills their session information in the browser if there is a
breach of security. Of course, with each web page request coming in from
anywhere, trying to piece together a flow of page to page action from a user
is hard, but we design our pages to really not require a persistent session
ID to flow from page to page if possible. Every web designer will look at
this differently, but the one thing is key - the web is not a client/server
application so trying to make it work like one can be fraught with issues.
However a session in some ways does help to tie things together a bit but
really shouldn't be used to simulate client/server application behavior.

Therefore if what you want to do is store some small amount of data on the
client's browser session, but reference it in PHP, then you can do that by
just getting the session data in an array from PHP and walking through the
array and storing the content you want in Firebird. Any normal connection
to FB would be fine for this. You don't need to use any pre-rolled stuff
for this as its about 8 lines of code and you're done. But if you need more
than this, I guess that's where I'm at a loss as to exactly what you are
looking to achieve and how to suggest a direction.

As for referencing your FB database in PHP, you need to ensure that you
include reference to the server & the path for Firebird. For example
/opt/firebird/databases/mydbase.fdb really should be referenced as
server:/opt/firebird/databases/mydbase.fdb and yes, the .fdb is required.

Hope this helps in some way.

Regards,
Myles

===============================
Myles Wakeham
Director of Engineering
Tech Solutions US, Inc.
Phone (480) 451-7440
www.techsol.org