amiribarksdale wrote:
What is the "standard" way to determine whether a user is indeed logged in to a site and online right then? I have a web app where users log in and get a cookie. Part of it is the sessin cookie which expires at the close of the session, and part of it is a longer lasting authentication cookie. Am I supposed to use the session cookie for this? Does it have to be stored in the db so it can be timestamped? Amiri
Since HTTP is a stateless protocol, it requires a little creativity to track "online" users. One way is to have a table in a database that keeps track of a person based upon their username/IP address and the last time they loaded a page. For example
* Client visits a page* Add/Update a row in the table with the client's username/IP address and set the timestamp to the current time * To retrieve a list of "online" users, pull all rows in the database with a timestamp within the last X minutes (for example, 10 minutes).
You could then periodically delete any rows from the table that are older than X minutes or hours. This would help keep the size down. The username for a client would be based upon a cookie or session information stored within your page.
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