NodeJS Variable Sessions undefined

Question

I'm trying to set up a session variable in my NodeJS application that should store the current user.

Unfortunately, I always get the following error :

TypeError: Cannot set property 'user' of undefined

One of my requisite is that I should not use a database to store the sessions, as it is a student project and I must respect the architecture asked.

Here is the function I use to login my user :

this.POSTLogin =function POSTLogin(LoginInformations,res,req){
    //prepare request
    var args = {
        data:{username:LoginInformations.username,password:LoginInformations.password},
        headers:{"Content-Type":"application/json"}
    };
    //check if credentials are valid
    client.post(this.restBaseUrl+"users/login",args,function(data,response){
        //logs for debug purpose
        console.log(data);
        console.log(response);
        //if there is a user
        if(response.statusCode == 200){
            var usr = new User();
            usr.email       = data.email       ;
            usr.facebookData= data.facebookData;
            usr.firstName   = data.firstName   ;
            usr.id          = data.id          ;
            usr.lastName    = data.lastName    ;
            usr.restToken   = data.restToken   ;
            usr.role        = data.role        ;
            usr.sessions    = data.sessions    ;
            var Rest = new RestService();
            //this line doesn't work
            req.session.user = usr;
            //redirect to his personal page with data
            Rest.GETPersonalStats(usr,res);

        }else{
            //is there is no user with those credentials, send it to login page again
            res.redirect('/users');
        }
    });
};

When I'm not trying to save the data into a session, everything works as expected.

At the start of this file, I have :

var session = require('client-sessions');
var express = require('express');
var app = express();
app.use(session({
    cookieName: 'session',
    secret: 'someRandomString',
    duration: 30 * 60 * 1000,
    activeDuration: 5 * 60 * 1000
}));

I did add "client-sessions" into my package.json file. I followed information based on this article.

EDIT: Based on @Shoyeb Memon's answer, I changed to use cookie-session. I now have this in my declaration :

var cookieParser = require('cookie-parser');
var cookieSession = require('cookie-session');
var app = express();
app.use(cookieParser('akey'));
app.use(cookieSession({
    name:'session',
    keys:['akey'],
    maxAge: 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000
}));

but the error didn't change at all... I used this to implement the sessions.

EDIT 2: When I changed my code the first time, I wanted to do it without copy-paste, and I followed instructions online. But I did try copy-pasting all, I removed the "store" and it seems to work fine now.

Answer 1

I will give you an example of it from my previous work which might be helpful to you

I have used express-session

const session = require('express-session');
const bodyParser = require('bosy-parser');

//Set Cookie
app.use(session(
{
 name: 'myName',
 secret: '#@$#!ng',
 resave: true,
 saveUninitialized: true,
 overwrite: true,
 unset: 'destroy',
 rolling: true,
 "cookie": {
   maxAge: 1000 * 60 * 15000000
  },
 store: new (require('express-sessions'))({
    storage: 'mongodb',
    instance: mongoose, // optional
    host: 'localhost', // optional
    port: 27017, // optional
    db: 'codepost', // optional
    collection: 'mysessions', // optional
    expire: 1000 * 60 * 15000000
   })
 }
));

I have set the cookie and stored my sessions in my database

Using session in one of my api:

const express = require('express');
const app = express();
const router = express.Router();

router.post("/validate", function(req,res){

  req.session.phoneNumber = req.body.phoneNumber;//storing value into 
                                                // session

  let userPhoneNumber = req.session.phoneNumber;//assigning to a var
  console.log(userPhoneNumber);

 }

Use can use the session to store the data which you have got from a text input.