CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpurisession-variables
Human
Human

Reputation: 565

Is passing session data from one PHP page to another efficient?

I was wondering if using a SESSION variable to pass data from one PHP page to another is efficient. I ask this because I thought that SESSIONS were only used to keep the user logged in to a website, and as an alternative to cookies. Would it not be better to pass data (non-sensitive) from one page to another via a URI such as members.php?name=Joe&age=28?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 380

Answers (4)

Sean McSomething
Sean McSomething

Reputation: 6507

Sessions are useful for lots of things, not just login information. They're great for holding status messages during a POST/redirect/GET cycle or anything else that keeps track of the state of the user's session (hence the name) - but only the current session, not long-term permanent configuration options.

As far as efficiency goes, you need to remember that anything in the session needs to be serialized & unserialized on every page load. Storing a name and age wouldn't add much. Adding a megabyte of image upload would probably be bad.

More important than the efficiency consideration is to remember that session data is only temporarily persistent. If you want to always know that Joe is 28, it should go in the database. If it's only useful on a single page load, it should probably stay in the URL or be POSTed. If you're interested in remembering it for a few minutes, the session might be the place to put it.

Upvotes: 2

Bibaswann Bandyopadhyay
Bibaswann Bandyopadhyay

Reputation: 3547

Yes, you can store data and message in SESSION and it is accessible from any page. But remember, SESSION uses browser support to store data. They can be deleted manually by the user

Upvotes: 0

Will
Will

Reputation: 5590

A PHP session writes a cookie to your browser and then stores the data associated with that session on disk; its about as expensive as an include() to read it back in on the next page load, which is to say completely trivial.

Additionally, the user can't change session data unless you create a mechanism which allows them to; they can mess with the query string easily.

Short answer: Yes, its efficient.

Upvotes: 5

John Conde
John Conde

Reputation: 219834

Depends on what you're doing. If that page requires that information to function properly and is not behind a login then passing in a query string is the way to go (e.g. search results, product pages). If it is behind a login then using a session would allow you to keep your URLs clean and also make it difficult for users to abuse the page (e.g. swap out data in the query string).

Upvotes: 2

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