Question

I have been rebuilding my social network in code igniter and am looking for an optimal way to start a session as logged in when the user logs in ( maybe contrary to using code igniters session class? as I want to use their id that is created when they make their account)

I have been able to CREATE a user and hash and salt their password and log them in using the hashed password.

My site is going to have a lot of ‘logged in’ and ‘logged out’ views that vary due to if the user is signed in or not.

That being said, upon login I want to start a logged in session with the id that is created upon sign-up.

Here is my controller that logs the user in minus what I’m trying to do.

function validate_credentials()
{
    $this->load->model('user_model', 'um');
    $login = $this->input->post('submit');
        $this->load->library('encrypt');

    if($login) {
        $user = $this->um->
                    validate(array('email' => $this->input->post('email')));
        if( $user ) {
            if($user->password == $this->encrypt->sha1( $user->salt .
                         $this->encrypt->sha1($this->input->post('password')))) {
                  $this->session->set_userdata( array('email' => 
                                   $this->input->post('email')
                  ));
                  redirect('account/dashboard');
                  exit;
            }
        }
    }
    $this->index();
}

/*---------- EDIT ----------*/
Getting these errors:



  Message: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /Users/mycomputer/Sites/cl_ci_new/application/controllers/auth.php:44)

    Filename: libraries/Session.php

    Line Number: 672

    Message: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /Users/mycomputer/Sites/cl_ci_new/application/controllers/auth.php:44)

    Filename: helpers/url_helper.php

    Line Number: 542

and here are those lines in my code or the Session.php file:

    // Set the cookie
        setcookie(
            this->sess_cookie_name,
            $cookie_data,
            $expire,
            $this->cookie_path,
            $this->cookie_domain,
            $this->cookie_secure
                );

and the url_helpers.php:

switch($method)
        {
            case 'refresh'  : header("Refresh:0;url=".$uri);
                break;
            default         : header("Location: ".$uri, TRUE, $http_response_code);
                break;
        }

I’m not understanding what the problem is….

Answer 1

On successful validation save a variable in session:

if ($user->password == ...) {
     $this->session->set_userdata('logged_in', TRUE);
}
else {
     $this->session->set_userdata('logged_in', FALSE);
}

Later on, when needed, check:

if ($this->session->userdata('logged_in')) {

}