Question

I’m writing a small non-commercial web app, and I’m wondering how to pass data from one piece of the code to others. Specifically, I want to output various messages to the user depending on the circumstances (“you’re logged in”, “logged out”, “status updated”, etc). (At this point, I don’t see the case where I would need to keep several messages in memory, but it’s not really relevant.) So I could structure my code with a $_SESSION['message'] variable, or I could systematically pass an instance of a class Message, or even a string variable, from one php file to the next.

I’m not sure if there are compelling reasons to use one approach rather than the other.

EDIT: The “pieces of code” I make reference to above are MVC Controllers that decide which function to execute and what to display. They then redirect to a front controller, so the instance changes. The front controller then loads the views.

Answer 1

The question makes not much sense to me.

In case you are talking of different PHP instances (for example, if you made a redirect after succesful login), you have a little choice but sessions.

In case you are talking of passing messages between code pieces within the same PHP script instance, there is no use for the sessions at all.