Using Advanced Functions to Maintain the State of Applications with PHP Sessions

Introduction

Before I dive into the subject of this second tutorial, I’ll go quickly over the topics that I explained in the first article, so it will be easier for you to understand some of the advanced PHP session features that I plan to discuss in the next few lines. As you’ll certainly recall, I started this series explaining the basic features of the PHP session management module, and showed some illustrative examples of how to create PHP sessions and store session data. In addition, I explained how to manipulate session identifiers and retrieve and manage some of the most common session-related settings included within the corresponding php.ini configuration file.

Based on the features that you saw previously, getting started using the basics of PHP sessions is really a straightforward process, which before long can help you in the development of simple session-based scripts with minor hassles. Moreover, if you’re a PHP developer with an intermediate grounding in PHP sessions, then probably you’ve already used some of the advanced features included in the corresponding session management module.

On the other hand, if you’re still not that familiar with the set of advanced session functions exposed by PHP, in this article I’ll take a look at them, in order to demonstrate with several code samples how to use them and how to take advantage of their many capabilities. Hopefully, when you finish reading this article, you should have a decent understanding of how to include advanced session handling routines within your own PHP-driven applications.

After defining the guidelines for this tutorial, it’s time to go ahead and explore some of most interesting PHP session-related functions. Let’s get started.