My idea for accessing zen cart sessions outside of zen...

[glenelkins]

sorry 1 more thing...

I know people over here LOVE to threadcrap just so they can get a dig at someone thinking outside the box

I always think outside the box! In programming, if you dont you get nowhere most of the time! Bollocks to people who put others down, i dont care i have a nicely paid job to think outside the box! lol

[CJPinder]

The main thing is i cannot understand what zen cart does to stop session working outside of itself.

It doesn't actively stop sessions working outside itself. Did you set up the session handler correctly? Most Zen Cart installations store the session information in the database and Zen Cart uses a custom session handler for this.

Regards,
Christian.

[glenelkins]

well in the login code it sets $_SESSION

but if you try accessing one of the var from a script outside the folder zen cart runs in, it does work. Its strange, every application iv ever written i can access my session vars in any folder i wish from any script file i wish

[CJPinder]

well in the login code it sets $_SESSION

but if you try accessing one of the var from a script outside the folder zen cart runs in, it does work. Its strange, every application iv ever written i can access my session vars in any folder i wish from any script file i wish

Zen Cart uses a custom session handler to store its session data. You cannot access the session data from $_SESSION until the data has been reloaded by the session handler. You'll need to read up on session_set_save_handler() and review the code in includes/functions/sessions.php .

Regards,
Christian.

[glenelkins]

The _sess_read() function has a value $key that it uses. What is this? And im not sure how this parses the $key value if you look here:

session_set_save_handler('_sess_open', '_sess_close', '_sess_read', '_sess_write', '_sess_destroy', '_sess_gc');


Where in this line does it parse data to the _sess_read function?

[glenelkins]

iv actually gone for storing session in files it works very well by getting the session id from $_COOKIE['zenid']; then unserializing the session file and checking for customer_id

[glenelkins]

So it works like this:

Set zen cart to store sessions as files.

$sess_id = $_COOKIE['zenid'];

$session_file = "/PATH/TO/ZEN/CACHE/sess_" . $sess_id;

$session_data = @file_get_contents ( $session_file );

$data = CUSTOM_UNSERIALIZE_FUNCTION ( $session_data );

foreach ( $data as $k => $v ) {

    if ( $k == "customer_id" && !empty ( $v ) ) {

        // USER IS LOGGED IN
        $customer_id = $v;

    }

}

Seems to work pretty nicely!

[oboeonetwothree]

Is there any other way to access session variables outside of zen cart (but on the same server in a directory containing it) or is this it?

[oboeonetwothree]

...the vailidation is done on the textpattern side in this case!

If the session variable is sent over to a grassroots page(no CMS - all php/html), do you know how this sort of identity validation be accomplished in php? I have enough of an understanding of php to read through and understand most scripts, but I'm not great at getting scripts to work - at least not quickly, so any help would be amazing. : )

[kobra]

oboeonetwothree,

What is it precisely that you are attempting to do in detail