The History Channel - PHP

patUser allows you to track user movement through your application with a set of history functions, which maintain a buffer of all the URLs visited and provide you with hooks to return to any of them. As you might imagine, this comes in handy if you need to provide users with controls to go back to the previous page, or to show them their browsing history.

The primary method to accomplish this is the keepHistory() method, a call to which should be included on every page of your application. The function accepts two parameters, the size of the history buffer and the title of the current page, and stores the current URL and supplied title in the session for easy retrieval.

Here's a sample of what that history buffer might look like:

Array
(
[0] => Array
(
[url] => /add_user.php?
[title] => Add User
)
[1] => Array
(
[url] => /patuser/modify_user.php?
[title] => Modify User
)
[2] => Array
(
[url] => /scripts/review.php?
[title] => Verify User
)
)

Once the history buffer has been created, data from it may be retrieved via the getHistory() method, which returns an array holding a list of all the URLs and pages visited by the user in the current session. The following example illustrates, using the sample data above as reference.

<?php
// include classes
include("../include/patDbc.php"); include("../include/patUser.php");
// initialize database layer
$db = new patMySqlDbc("localhost", "db211", "us111", "secret");
// initialize patUser
$u = new patUser(true);
// connect patUser to database
$u->setAuthDbc($db);
// set tables
$u->setAuthTable("users");
// get history
$history = $u->getHistory();
// iterate over array
// display history with clickable URLs
echo "<h2>Your history:</h2>";
echo "<ol>";
foreach ($history as $h)
{
echo "<li><a href=" . $h['url'] . ">" . $h['title'] . "</a>"; } echo "</ol>";
?>

An additional goHistory() method makes it possible to send the browser back to a specific page in the buffer via HTTP redirection. Consider the following script, which accepts a number and redirects the browser back that many pages (note that the goHistory() method must be provided with negative values as input):

<?php
// include classes
include("../include/patDbc.php"); include("../include/patUser.php");
// initialize database layer
$db = new patMySqlDbc("localhost", "db211", "us111", "secret");
// initialize patUser
$u = new patUser(true);
// connect patUser to database
$u->setAuthDbc($db);
// set tables
$u->setAuthTable("users");
// go back i pages
$u->goHistory($_GET['i'] * -1);
?>

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