Question

I want to save some global vars to use in the website, like current user id, current user lever, and so on. Where is the best place to do it, or is it possible?

Setting it into constants.php is not working since “$this” is not recognized there.

The principal reason why I want this is because i don’t like using sessions (I consider writing strings like $this->session->userdata('session_name') not so practical, writing something like CURR_UID is more easy to do it and read as well)

Answer 1

It’s possible, but it isn’t the way that Codeigniter was designed. Sessions are really the place for this kind of thing (namely, stuff that persists from one page view to the next), but you could wrap the session calls up in a library for beauty’s sake if you wanted. Something like this:

// in libraries/User.php
class User {

  protected $ci;

  public function __construct() {
    $this->ci = &get_instance();
  }

  public function id() {
    return $this->ci->session->userdata('user_id');
  }

  // etc, etc.
}

Once you’ve written a few more helpers like id(), you can use them to access the relevant variables elsewhere in your application:

$this->load->library('user');
echo 'Current user ID is: ' . $this->user->id();