Question

When user logins or when he registers, his $_SESSION['username'] gets the value of his username. I want to allow them access certain controllers only if they registered. But I don’t like the idea of writing this:

function __construct()
{
  session_start();
  if(empty($_SESSION['username']))
     die();

  parent::__construct();
}

in every controller I don’t want unloggined people to see. Is there any better way to do it? Thanks.

Answer 1

You might consider extending your base controller class (see the Codeigniter Wiki Article on extending the class) to provide a require_login function:

class MY_Controller extends CI_Controller {

  protected function require_login() {
    if(empty($_SESSION['username']))
      die();
    }
  }

Once you have this, you can call require_login() in the constructor of each controller you want to protect:

function __construct() {
  $this->require_login();
}

Finally, instead of using PHP’s $_SESSION superglobal for session storage, you might consider taking advantage of the Codeigniter session library or an equivalent.