Re: [webmin-devel] session handling?

[Jamie C. <jca...@we...>]

Marius Popovici wrote:
> Hi all,
> I am currently working on a Webmin module and I was wondering if 
> there is session support in miniserv. I looked through the docs and i
> couldn't find anything on the subject so if anyone knows something the
> help would be appreciated. 
> 
> What i am trying to do is the following. I have some module
> configuration properties that are frequently requested by many CGIs and
> i want to avoid reading this stuff from a configuration file everytime
> it is needed. Instead i want to create a ConfigurationProperties object
> that is stored in the server's session so it can be accessed very
> quickly. 

Webmin doesn't have any kind of automatic session object tracking like 
JSP scripts or servlets do, but you can get the current session ID 
from the $session_id global variable. This could then be used as a key 
to lookup an entry in a DBM or text file that your module maintains, 
to store extra information associated with the session.

The code might look something like :

dbmopen(%sessiondata, "$module_config_directory/sessiondata", 0700);

# set_session_data(hashreference)
sub set_session_data
{
$sessiondata{$session_id} = &serialize_variable($_[0]);
}

# get_session_data()
# Returns a hash reference
sub get_session_data
{
return &unserialise_variable($sessiondata{$session_id});
}

Note the use of the serialize_variable and unserialise_variable 
standard functions to convert an arbitrary Perl hash to and from a 
string that can be safely stored in the DBM.

  - Jamie