Question

I have a site that has different features and functionality based on the location that the user has selected. Each location has events that are unique to that location. These events are the primary reason that a user comes to the site for.

There are key areas of the site that are not navigable unless a location is selected for the user. Therefore, the location has to be presumed until the selected location is known — I plan on using some basic GeoIP lookups for this.

So the requirements basically boil down to:

1. Location must be set before any page on the site is loaded
2. User can change the location setting
3. The location setting must persist from request to request
4. This setting should be accessible to the layout and view and will be a prerequisite for most controllers

I can think of a few ways off the top of my head to tackle this (Zend_Registry, custom Zend_Session_Namespace, etc) but I’m curious if there isn’t a more widely identified strategy for this type of problem.

Answer 1

I see this as similar to setting language for a site with i18n and so i would implement in a similar fashion. Id probably store the location in a session value, or if the user is registered they could obviously save it to their settings/profile in whatever backend storage mechanism is being used. You could also add this location to the route params as is often done with i18n but that could get messy given its a geo location and not just a locale.