How to check logged in online users using Zend Framework

Question

I want to know how to get the number of users currently online or having active sessions on a website using Zend Framework.

I tried the usual way of reading Session save path, but its not working using Zend. Can anyone here suggest me a good method to know how many active sessions are on the server at any moment of time.

Answer 1

You can't use sessions to do this, you would have to store the online users in a DB and display all who are active.on log out delete/update records from db.

or put a flag in ur users table and update flag as y/n every time a user logged in / log out.

or something similar to this.

If user closes browser without logout then when next time user tries to log in. u can check previous active sessions for that user, if there? give a window to user that last logout was not correct and take any event from that user to update time or u can ask user to enter log out time (estimated) for late session or if users are not interested to select time u can update logout with a logout time . make a slandered interval of login duration.

think like this way......

Answer 2

Recently had that problem. Solved it like this:

Usually a controller is an extension of Zend_Controller_action, for example

class IndexController extends Zend_Controller_Action

What we did in our project was create an extended controller under /library/ME/Controller

class ME_Controller_Base extends Zend_Controller_Action
    public function init()
    {
        parent::init();
    }
}

Using this controller you can extend all your other controllers from it - so, the above default controller goes from

class IndexController extends Zend_Controller_Action

to

class IndexController extends ME_Controller_Base

Important, remember to always call parent::init() in the init() section of your controller (this is good practice anyway)

class IndexController extends ME_Controller_Base
{
    public function init()
    {
        parent::init();
    }
}

Now you can add any code you like to the "Base" controller. As we are using Zend_Auth with a Doctrine user object, the final "base" controller looks like this

class ME_Controller_Base extends Zend_Controller_Action
    public function init()
    {
        parent::init();
        $auth = Zend_Auth::getInstance();
        $this->view->user = $auth;
        $this->user       = $auth;

        // check auth
        ...
        // write an update to say that this user is still alive
        $this->user->getIdentity()->update();
    }
}

The update() method just sets an "updated" field to the current date and flushes the user. You can then just select users who were seen within the last X minutes to show the list.

Answer 3

Instead of create base controller and extend all other controllers from that, we can create and use Zend Front Controller plugin ( see examples here) to register all request to our website or web application.

class App_Plugin_RegisterActivity extends Zend_Controller_Plugin_Abstract
{
    public function dispatchLoopShutdown() {

        // read user identity
        $auth = Zend_Auth::getInstance();
        $authStorage = $auth->getStorage();
        $identity = $authStorage->read();

        $userID = $identity->id;

        // update user's table with current timestamp
        .....

    }
}

Then we count active users and much more.