Question

I am currently making a time-clock system that is inside of a custom-built application (CRM) that a previous developer did. I’ve got the timeclock coming along nicely but have just a few questions..

Upon clocking in I set a session like so: $this->get('session')->set('clockedin', 'true');

I set a session so that I in order to show the clockin or clockout button I figured the easiest method would be to just read a session variable to determine which button to show using a twig if/else statement in the templates (i have the buttons show in 2 places, 1 is in every page and 1 is only in the timeclock system itself)

So, is this the best way to go about doing this or is there a better recommended way of going about it?

The next thing I wondered about is session expiration… in my config.yml I see:

session:
    cookie_lifetime:       43200
    auto_start:     true

So, does this mean that the way i’ve set it lasts for 12 hours? Or in order for that to be true, would I need to use a cookie instead? I think that a cookie might be better, because if the browser closes (many of the employees aren’t technologically inclined) I’d need this to be a persistent upon the next page load..

Thanks for any help..

Answer 1

If another indefinitely later operation depends on clockedin state I would not rely on sessions. If user logs him/herself out session gets invalidated (whole session), so clockedin would be lost.

I would rather use {% include %} or {% render %} to determine state every time you need to display that button. For example:

/**
 * @Template()
 */
public function clockedInAction(){
   .... // do some login here
   $clocked_in = ....;
   return array(
        'clockedin' => $clockedin
   );
}

and in your Twig:

{% render "AcmeBundle:SomeController:clockedIn" %}

Template of this controller would contains that {% if .... %} you wanted originally:

{# AcmeBundle:SomeController:clockedIn.html.twig #}
{% if clockedIn %}
   display "Clocked In" button
{% else %}
   display "Clocked Out" button
{% endif %}

Now, this is more expensive since on each request you have to assess the situation and then print appropriate template, but it’s always consistent with a system…