How to Maintain State Information

Nik has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I was curious as to what method people use to maintain session information in CGI scripts. When a user goes from page to page on my site, each page is processed by a cgi script. What is the best way to maintain state and login information? Should I create a file that contains a random key along with the user login and use that to carry state information? Or should I add a row to a database table for each user in maintaining state? In other words, is database access or file access going to be faster?

Up until now i udes cookies but this isnt best way because most people dont allow cookies to bes tored to theit pc through the browser. Whats do you suggest? Can you give me an example?

The Devil Is In The Details!

Comment on How to Maintain State Information

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Re: How to Maintain State Information by valdez (Monsignor) on Jun 27, 2004 at 15:02 UTC
I use CGI::Session, it has various backends (DB_File, plain files, MySQL, PostgreSQL) and can be used with cookies or hidden form fields; it has also a little Cook book. I use it in conjunction with CGI::Application, see CGI::Application::Session for an example of use. There are many nodes about this topic, use Super Search to find them... update: Tired of session/cookie problem, Secure Session Management, Tips for Using Apache::Session, Cleaning up sessions created by Apache::Session::File when logging out of a CGI application, non-cookie session maintenance, CGI::Application CGI::Session problem, practical aspects of sessions and state, CGI::Session::MySQL, CGI::Application::Session - A stateful extension to CGI::Application. Ciao, Valerio	[reply]
Re: How to Maintain State Information by bassplayer (Monsignor) on Jun 27, 2004 at 15:04 UTC
I was curious as to what method people use to maintain session information in CGI scripts. When a user goes from page to page on my site, each page is processed by a cgi script. What is the best way to maintain state and login information? Should I create a file that contains a random key along with the user login and use that to carry state information? Or should I add a row to a database table for each user in maintaining state? In other words, is database access or file access going to be faster? What was wrong with the answer to the FAQ that you 'borrowed' (verbatim, I might add) this question from? Also, Super Search or even a regular title search reveals many nodes on this subject... bassplayer	[reply]
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Re: How to Maintain State Information by l3nz (Friar) on Jun 27, 2004 at 20:07 UTC
You usually don't store the actual data on the client cookie, but you store a session cookie that will point to some place on disk where you keep the session data stored. A number of utilities around help automating this. If you cannot store a cookie on the client, you usually add the session information in a hidden variable, more or less like PHP does with PHPSESSIONID..... This is the general idea. Then, as you say, the devil is in the details. :-)	[reply]
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