Creating and Managing Sessions in PHP Scripts

<< PHP Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples

This chapter provides tutorial examples and notes about session. Topics include understanding of the session concept; writing scripts to create and use a session; storing data in the current session; managing session IDs as cookies and URL transparent parameters.

What Is a Session?

How Sessions Are Support in PHP?

SessionPage*.php - Session Test Script Pages

Running Session Test Script Pages

Managing Session IDs without Cookies

Where Is Session Data Stored?

Conclusion:

• A session ID must be passed between HTTP requests and responses to link them into a single sequence.
• Passing the session ID as a cookie value is more secure.
• Passing the session ID as a transparent URL variable is less secure, because the session ID will be displayed in the Web page address field.
• You must call the built-in function, session_start(), at the beginning of the PHP script to start a new session, or continue with an existing session.
• The built-in array, $_SESSION, can be used to pass information from one script to another script that shares the same session as the first script.
• Session data is persisted to the hard disk permanently on the server side.