Question

I’ve a online service tool where users registers themselves and use it.

I’ve admin control panel for this service. Sometimes when users tell us some weird things about data and usuability , we need to check them as if they were logging in …

so i decided to have a page in admin panel as ‘log in as xx user’ where xx is an user of our service..

I done it by simply setting sessions variables for that particular user account and bypassing the login option.. When i finished testing, i logout and again login as admin to do other activities..

But now i need not logout and then login as admin after everytime i logged in as different user..

Can i set two simultaneous session at a time for a single page/service???

(i.e) in one tab of the browser i act as an admin and in other tab i’ll act as a user?

Any ideas..

I remember ‘ve seen phpbb using them…

Answer 1

Session is kinda globally available array, you can separate frontend and backend sessions like this:

<?php

    $_SESSION['frontend']['logged_id'] = true;
    $_SESSION['backend']['logged_id'] = false;

?>

Your script would help me to give you more detailed sample code.

Update

1. Add prefixes to your set sessions. Like this: $_SESSION['my_CID'] = $cid;
2. You have to dig into the backend/admin code and find where logout action happens.
3. That action may be killing the whole session like this: session_destroy() or unset($_SESSION);.
4. Use the code below not to kill prefixed sessions.

Here’s the code:

<?php
    foreach ($_SESSION as $key => $value)
    {
        if (substr($key, 0, 3) == 'my_')
        {
            continue;
        }
        unset($_SESSION[$key]);
    }
?>