Hoa is a modular, extensible and structured set of PHP libraries. Moreover, Hoa aims at being a bridge between industrial and research worlds.

Hoa\Session

This library allows to manipulate sessions easily by creating “namespaces”, i.e. an entry in the $_SESSION global variable. It also allows to manipulate flash sessions.

Each namespace has a profile. Amongst many things, it implies we can control lifetime of each namespace individually. This library can be used in conjunction of ext/session (especially to configure session).

Some features from PHP5.4+ can be used naturally as defined in the documentation with prior versions, such as the SessionHandlerInterface interface or the session_register_shutdown function.

Quick usage

We propose a quick overview of three usages: manipulating a namespace, expiration handling and destructing a namespace.

Manipulating a namespace

We will start a user namespace. If this namespace is empty, it implies two things: either the session is newly created or it has expired. In all cases, we print first time and save the current time in foo. And if the namespace is not empty, we print other times and dump the saved time. Thus:

$user = new Hoa\Session('user');

if($user->isEmpty()) {

    echo 'first time', "\n";
    $user['foo'] = time();
}
else {

    echo 'other times', "\n";
    var_dump($user['foo']);
}

First execution will print first time and next ones will print other times followed by a timestamp.

No need to start the session, it will be done automatically. But if we want to, we can use the session_start function or the Hoa\Session::start static method, which is more sophisticated.

Expiration handling

If a namespace expires before the session, either an event is fired on the channel hoa://Event/Session/<namespace>:expired or an exception Hoa\Session\Exception\Expired is thrown (if no callable listens the channel). We can test if the namespace is expired with the help of the Hoa\Session::isExpired method or we can declare the namespace as expired with the help of the Hoa\Session::hasExpired method (this method will throw an exception or fire an event).

Considering the previous example, we will declare the namespace as expired when the session is empty:

event('hoa://Event/Session/user:expired')
    ->attach(function ( Hoa\Core\Event\Bucket $bucket ) {

        echo 'expired', "\n";
    });

$user = new Hoa\Session('user');

if($user->isEmpty()) {

    $user->hasExpired();
    echo 'first time', "\n";
    $user['foo'] = time();
}
else {

    echo 'other times', "\n";
    var_dump($user['foo']);
}

First execution will print expired and first time, and next ones will print other times followed by a timestamp.

If an empty session does not imply an expiration (depending of our workflow and configuration), we could avoid the call to $user->hasExpired(): the test is automatically done during the construction of the namespace.

We can modify the lifetime by using the Hoa\Session::rememberMe method; for example:

$user->rememberMe('+1 day');

And we can also forget the namespace:

$user->forgetMe();

Destructing a namespace

Destructing a namespace uses the Hoa\Session::delete method:

$user = new Hoa\Session('user');
$user['foo'] = 'bar';
$user->delete();

Stored data in the namespace are lost because we explicitly delete the namespace.

If we want to destroy the session (including all namespaces and cookie), we could use the Hoa\Session::destroy static method. Again, no need to previously start the session manually if it is not done.

Documentation

Different documentations can be found on the website: http://hoa-project.net/.

License

Hoa is under the New BSD License (BSD-3-Clause). Please, see LICENSE.