Symfony2: log user activity

Question

I'm new to Symfony and PHP (previously worked with C++, Java) and I can't find any solution on how to log user login and logout actions to a database. I want those specific informations:

• user who took the action (via userId),
• action description (login or logout),
• current timestamp.

I'm looking for the simplest possible solution. I managed to successfully log information on user login by modifying function rendering user login form, but I failed miserably when it comes to logout. I know it is a terrible idea after all, but I couldn't come up with any better one. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

If you have a look here, it says you can define a success handler and a failure handler which you use to log stuff to your database. You can also find the handler parameters defined in the reference documentation.

Login

You would first create a service which get's the security.context and entityManager as parameters and uses both to determine which user logged in. This service is then added to the success_handler parameter and therefor called after the user logs in.

Logout

This one is more tricky I guess, as I would assume that the security.context has no information about the user anymore and you cannot use it to determine which user is logging out. You may want to look into what the handlers parameter actually is. It might be a handler which is called while processing the logout, so you could use it. Of course you might log some logouts which fail because without the success handler you cannot be sure the logout was successfull. On the other hand, maybe you can get the session id from somewhere (again, security.context maybe) and log this instead.