Session Management

Sessions allow data to be shared across multiple requests. In tranditional PHP application, you may access them through global variable $_SESSION directly. but in Blink, it is not an option, the only way to access session data is through session service.

Besides, session related function that provided by PHP should never be used in Blink application to avoid possible undefined behaviors.

Session Service

Blink implemented blink\session\Manager class to provide session service for our application, the session service can be accessed through session() helper function, here is several example shows how session service can be used:

$manager = session(); // retrieving the session service

$session = $manager->put($data); // creating a new session with $data, the returned $session is an instance of \blink\session\Session
$sessionId = $session->id; //accessing the session id

$session = $manager->get($sessionId); // gettting session data by session id

$manager->set($sessionId, $newData); // replacing session with new data

$manager->destroy($sessionId); // destroying session data by session id

In the example above, both put() and get() method return a blink\session\Session object. The blink\session\Session is a collection of key-value pairs of sessions which provides some very helpful method to edit or update session.

In Blink, it is possible to implement your own custom session service, the only thing you need is implement the blink\session\Contract interface and configure your service in configuration file.

Session Storage

By default, files are be used to storage session data in Blink, it is possible to change this behavior by using custom session storage class. To implement our own session storage class, we need implement the blink\session\StorageContract interface. For more detailed information, you can refer the implementation of blink\session\FileStorage class.

Extending Session

Starting from v0.3.1, Blink added the ability to subclass blink\session\Session, which can be configured through blink\session\Manager::$sessionClass in src/config/services.php config file by default.

By utilizing this, it would be easier to implement custom authentiction mechanisms such as the AccessToken and RefreshToken of OAuth2 for the Blink framework.

For more information, you can refer Blink Passport for detail usage examples.