Question

Is it possible to save the session data for database purposes before being destroyed?

For instance, I have the data below from a session,

// start session
session_start();

// init session var
if (!isset($_SESSION['images'])) $_SESSION['images'] = array();

array
  0 => 
    array
      'image_id' => int 1
      'image_title' => string 'test 1' (length=6)
  1 => 
    array
      'image_id' => int 2
      'image_title' => string 'test 2' (length=6)

And I want to send it to database when the session is destroyed or when the browser is closed.

if(unset($_SESSION['images']))
{
    // do something?
}

Is it feasible?

Answer 1

You should think of session_start(); as creating a single cookie on your browser with a hash that matches a session file on the server, the server will place any data into the $_SESSION whilst your “session” is active, once you close the browser that cookie is discarded from your browser, and eventually(a clean-up invoked by a cron) the session file is removed from the server.

If you want to store persistent data for a time period or user then you should store it in the database, a cache file, memcache or such.