Show users online

Hi

is there a way to show live when a users is online? i want to be able to see who is signed in and show that information live?

Thanks

this is not at all easy to do and is not supported.

you would need to create a table that stores the ID of each user using an insert behavior when they log in, that parts pretty easy.

you also need to delete the record when they log out, this is the hard part because there are a number of different things that can happen to log the user out.

the user could go to the logout page and click the logout, we can use this to trigger code to delete the record.

the user could leave the computer and the login session times out - no way to trigger code to delete the record this way

the user could close the browser to end the session - no way top trigger code here either

so 2 out 3 ways to logout leave the record stranded in the database and the user appears to be logged in, but in reality, they are not.

Can you not just show the needed information from every login session created on the server? Sessions are created on the server side from every user that login,right? So i guess it should be somehow possible to retrieve the name or ID within each session created and list them live as long as the session exist.

Just an idea though, maybe i'm wrong thinking :-)

Dave

technically, you are correct, but in practice doing that is a nightmare for a number of reasons.

one being that the format of the ses_* files created in the session.save_path is known to change from version to version of php, even in minor version updates.


In some instances, the php server may be configured to persist session data in memory, therefore, wont create the ses_* files.

In any case, this is not functionality supported by security assist.