Question

I am fairly new and just started to use Codeigniter, and have come across some confusion regarding sessions.

What I want to achieve is, like in regular php, I want to check if a user is logged in by using a header include file which checks the session data. I dont want to check/write that checking code in every controller while passing data to the view file.

Can someone please show me how it can be done?

Ex. I don’t want to do the following in every controller:

//Controller:
if($this->session->userdata('loggedin'){
$data['loggedin'] = $this->session->userdata('loggedin');
}
//I dont want to check the above on every function in every controller
$this->load->view('some_view_file', $data);

//some_view_file
if(isset($loggedin)){
echo "You are logged in!";
}
else
{
echo "Please log in!";
}

Instead, I want something to like the following:

//some view file
if(isset($loggedin))
{
echo "your logged in";
}
else
{
echo "please log in";
}

And also, how can I use native php sessions instead of CI Sessions. Any help will be much appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

Firstly, theres no reason you can’t just write something like this in your view:

<? echo ($this->session->userdata('loggedin')) ? "Logged In": "Not Logged In"; ?>

Then your controllers don’t need any of that code.

However if the check is more complex or something, then theres a few places you can do it.

1) In the constructor of a custom controller: create a new file application/core/MY_Controller.php, and override the constructor with something like:

class MY_Controller extends CI_Controller 
{
    public function __construct() 
    {
        parent::__construct();
        if($this->session->userdata("loggedin")) {
            // do something
        }
    }
}

then make all your controllers extend MY_Controller.

2) Or in a post_controller_constructor hook. http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/general/hooks.html (this is more transparent, and probably easier if you have tons of controllers already)

You can use native sessions with this:
http://codeigniter.com/wiki/Native_session/