After my last article about Session Management in PHP4, I got several emails from people that had problems implementing what I tried to describe. All theese emails had the same question:
Can you give me example code ? Yes, sure I can.

I will assume that you have read my previous article ( it's here in case you missed it). As I described earlier, you have to tell PHP that the current page use session variables by calling the session_start() function. Once this function is called, you are free to register any variable that you have bound as a session variable. This is done using the session_register() function.

The first example (page1.php):




<?php



session_start();

$my_session_variable = "some value";

session_register("my_session_variable");



?>

What this does is that it registers the variable my_session_variable as a session variable. This means that the variable will be alive (keep it's value) across page-accesses, as long as you call the session_start() function on all pages that need access to the my_session_variable variable.

Example 2 (page2.php):




<?php



session_start();

print "Value of 'my_session_variable': $my_session_variable";



?>

Try this out, you'll see that the variable kept it's value across pages!

Using session variables for authentication in conjunction with a database is just as simple. Create a login-page gives the user a userid and password form and posts to another PHP page (this example uses mysql):




<?php



session_start();



if (@$userid && @$password) {

    $res = @mysql_query("SELECT userid FROM users WHERE userid='$userid' AND password='$password'");

    if(@mysql_num_rows($res) != 0) {

        $verified_user = $userid;

        session_register("verified_user");

    }

}



Header("Location: your_main_page.php");



?>

Now, on 'your_main_page.php', you call session_start() and then you can check the verified_user variable to see if the user has been authenticated (and who he is). As simple as that.

There's alot more uses for session variables though, I use it for letting the load of my database by caching certain values in the session rather than reading them from the database on each page access.

Another small addition to my previous article: You can store objects in session variables as of Beta 3 of PHP4. Several people pointed this out to me, so I thought I'd tell you all.