Question

Is it possible to make an action (more specifically ‘ajax/heartbeat’) not update last request time for the session ?

It is used for fetching notifications etc, so it shouldn’t update timeout on sessions or they will never expire.

If the user is doing stuff on the page (onmousemove) I set update=true else update=false

Answer 1

Well, you will have to hook into the User lib of Symfony.

lastRequest is updated during the initialization of the User lib (ie: inside sfBasicSecurityUser).

Inside your app/[appname]/lib/myUser.class.php, extends this initialize function to not set the request time. Something ugly like that:

public function initialize(sfEventDispatcher $dispatcher, sfStorage $storage, $options = array())
{
  $lastRequest = $this->getLastRequestTime();

  parent::initialize($dispatcher, $storage, $options);

  if (condition)
  {
    $this->lastRequest = $lastRequest;
  }
}

The only things you need to find is, how to catch the module/action from the myUser lib and then place it in condition.