Hello

im not familiar with mason either
but i did take four hours a weekend ago to actually understand session
here is a db enabled testscript
you can run this like
perl sessiontest.pl
perl sessiontest.pl get_id=*sessionid*
or
perl sessiontest.pl visa_number=1234566

first one set a session second grabs the session and
third sets a session with the visa number

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use Apache::Session::Postgres;
use CGI;


my $driver   = "Pg";
my $dbname   = "database";
my $host     = "127.0.0.1";
my $user     = "user";
my $password = "password";
my $dbh      =
  DBI->connect(
"dbi:$driver(PrintError=>1,RaiseError=>1,Taint=>1):dbname=$dbname;host
+=$host",
    $user, $password );

my $q           = CGI->new;
my $id          = $q->param('get_id');
my $visa_number = $q->param('visa_number');

tie my %hash, 'Apache::Session::Postgres', $id, { Handle => $dbh, };
if ( !$id && $visa_number ) {
    $hash{visa_number} = $visa_number;
}

use Data::Dumper;
print Data::Dumper->Dump( [%hash] );
[download]

back in the day we didnt have no old school