I have a Laravel Project (including authentication users). I need to log session duration time. That's easy if the user click on logout, but what about if the user closes the tab/window?
I thought to use JavaScript to manipulate that events or set a timeout to send an ajax request to the server to say "Hey! I'm online!" and then update session duration, but it seems is not efficient.
Any ideas?
There is no way to know for sure if a user is still loged in on your website. The closest way to check for this is indeed to use a javascript that makes an ajax call every x seconds. This is what Facebook used to do to check if users are still online.
Related
I have an alert that pops up when the users session is about to expire and when it does expire. The issue is that if multiple tabs are open for the app, multiple alerts will get fired in succession which is very annoying.
I'd like to make a check on the backend for session information before showing an alert. That way if in one tab the session is about to expire (according to the front end), but it's not actually about to expire because you've been operating in another tab, the alert won't display and steal browser focus. Ideally I'd like this to remain as an alert so the first and proper display of the warning does take browser focus.
So is it possible to make a request like this without refreshing the session?
Trying to do this in JavaScript is silly - it will be really hard to keep the countdown timer in sync with the PHP session.
If you are implementing a hard timeout on the session then you must already be using a custom session handler - so simply implement a variant of that in your Ajax responder which does not lock or write back the session.
OTOH if you're not really implementing a hard session timeout, and you are not already using a custom session handler (which I suspect really is the case). Then just check the timestamp on the session file.
I'm making a project in primefaces and I'm puzzling in something simple.
The objective is:
When an AjAX request is made, send something to the browser so that it knows the session has expired.
By knowing that the session has expired, it knows it must display the login form (the contents are inside a <template> tag) in a popin (modal(?) box) and it displays it.
When the user tries to submit the form, the js intercepts the submit event and it sends the login using AJAX.
On successful login, re-send the previous AJAX request that had failed due to session timeout.
Update:
To solve this, I decided to use, a filter, I was able to do the request interception and I was able to analyze if the session had timed out. Given that, there seem to be a specific header that is always sent when it is a request using DOM's XMLHttpRequest(), so I can use that to decide the kind of answer it should give for session timeout.
With that, I send the answer to the client... Now what?
This is something super simple I had already made when not using any framework at all but now, using primefaces, I can't seem to be able to even get started, I have no clue how to do it.
This is on primefaces 5.0 with only its dependencies.
I'm looking for an event that will return when close page whether the user is connected to my site.
onbeforeunload does not help me because it is also activated in efresh, submit, browse from page to page on the same site.
There is no client side event that triggers when a user leaves your site for another site specifically.
If you want to know if users are online you can make repeated ajax calls on a timer, and use a server side session that updates a timestamp of the last request. Using this you can query the timestamps for example, get sessions where the timestamp is in the last 2 minutes.
If polling is an option and you have a server-side backend, you could make a keep-alive script polling the server every x seconds and add it to all pages on your site. If you do not receive enough calls (i suggest at least 3 or so), consider it as a signal the user has logged out. Of course this won't provide an immediate feedback, but should be reliable enough.
I'm coding a translation system for multiple messages.
I've a page with a table listing all the messages that need to be translated. When a translator click on a message to translate it, I lock it cause no other translator can be assigned to it.
The problem arises when a translator enters and instead to write something, leaves the page in an unconventional way like back button or closing the browser.
If this happens I want to unlock the message to make it available again to other translators.
How can I reach this behavior?
I know the javascript onbeforeunload event but triggers also every time a user refresh the page and this isn't what I want.
ty in advance
EDIT:
seems that implementing a js ajax call to notify every minute the server is the way to go. Now the question is how to handle the PHP server side?
You can use WebSockets, but in my opinion its a immature technology and still away from being firewall friendly.1
So, you can use HTTP polling. Use a JavaScript to make a HTTP request to the server from time to time, so it will show to the server the client is still in the page. The time will depend on connection, number of user's etc, but putting it before the keep-alive expires is a good idea as the TCP/IP connection is still open.
If the user leaves the page, the polling will not execute, and after not receiving the HTTP request for x seconds plus some time, the server can assume the user is not more on the page.
1 - Well its the firewall that is not friendly of WebSockets, this probably will change with time
What's wrong with using onbeforunload and asking the person if they really want to leave the page with unsaved changes?
I'd use the mentioned approach while proving a manual save button.
Also, a timeout on locks would help, so if the person has not edited the field for several minutes, it'd be unlocked and the person would be notified via a JS AJAX call.
EDIT: to implement the AJAX timer, I'd do the following:
save last access time to the translation item in a database or in a file on the PHP side
once every 30 seconds, do an AJAX call to a PHP script that will verify the last access time
depending on the result, return an "OK" or "TIMEOUT" message from the PHP script to the JavaScript part, which will then either do nothing (for OK) or deactivate the translation and inform the translation about the timeout
I was tasked to build a calendar and agenda library (I'm working on the CodeIgniter framework), that shows a calendar and the user has the possibility to set events on that calendar.
These events will have a notification system both email, and when the user is browsing the site, a popup.
My issue is how to approach the notification part when the user is on the site. The email is something that I already decided would be done trough a cronjob that will run every x minutes and check if there is any need to send a notification email.
The on site notification is something else.
How would I approach this? I just can't make a ajax request to the server every x seconds, since that would put an unnaceptable load on the system. (Of course when the user is eventually notified, a request must be made, to set the user as "remined" on the database).
I can't just depend on the user's date time, since he could be anywhere in the world and the time would be different.
How can I check that the user must be notified of a event, avoiding making repeated requests to the server? Would appreciate any input.
I could see using setTimeout to do this. Say a user visits your page $minutesTilDue minutes prior the reminder being due. Assuming jQuery/PHP:
$(function(){
setTimeout(function(){
showEventReminder(<?php json_encode($event) ?>);
}, <?php echo $minutesTilDue ?> * 60 * 1000);
});
Nothing too fancy, but depending on your requirements...
Cheers
Easily scalable notification systems use websockets, which today reach the majority of the users, even on mobile devices. Unfortunately, you'll need a websocket-enabled server - node, glassfish, whatever - this can't be done with standard PHP deployments (mod_php or fcgi). Server events (so called server push) are sent when they are generated, so once you have your websocket client-server pair, sending a reminder is just like sending an email.
Actually things are more complicated because most likely users won't be online at the exact time the reminder should pop up. I suggest a notification icon which is refreshed each time the user hits a page. This way your calendar system (suppose a cronjob) will simply update a flag for the user row in the DB, and when you build the page, you already know if there reminders (let's say, in the next 60 minutes) or not, and choose the icon accordingly. At this point, you have two choices:
sending the reminders to the client along with each and every request (it could be a waste of bandwidth, but I don't thing a JSON-encoded list of events is so heavyweight)
Download the reminders asynchronously on demand, ie only when the user hits the notification icon
This scenario lets you reuse the PHP environment and code, and doesn't require another host for the websocket server. I think this is the best solution, even if this doesn't fulfill your requirement of a truly popup reminder triggered by the server at the right time. BTW, if you send events with every request, your javascript can pop up when needed - you can use setTimeout() for this.