Question

I’m debugging a Magento site that has several pages of forms. A bug appears at the very end of this process. It’s time consuming to re-enter the forms each time I want to test a new iteration.

Is it possible, via core or an extension, to save a session and then reload it later?

Answer 1

I don’t know of any products or projects which do this specifically, but assuming the form actually stores its values in the PHP session you could probably (i.e. I haven’t tested this) throw something together yourself.

When Magento is configured to use file based sessions, you’ll find the sessions in the var/session folder. You can read this data into the $_SESSION array with the following command line script (assuming a session name of sess_jd88xxih1f0qp81ar5pkdkc974)

<?php
    $file = file_get_contents('var/session/sess_jd88xxih1f0qp81ar5pkdkc974');
    session_start();
    session_decode($file);
    var_dump($_SESSION);

Then, you’d modify the values in $_SESSION, and generate a new session string using session_encode

$_SESSION['test'] = 'foo baz bar';
$string = session_encode();
echo $string;

And finally, write the session file back out

file_put_contents('var/session/sess_jd88xxih1f0qp81ar5pkdkc974', $string);

All of that said, look into browser automation tools like Selenium. These tools seems to be the defacto way to solve the sort of problem your’e describing.