Beginning PHPSession #3

November 30, 2010

Josh Butts

Agenda

•Application organization

•Superglobals

•Forms, GET and POST

•Sessions

•Basic Dates & Times

Superglobals

•Available in every scope, no matter what

•Automatically set by PHP

•Arrays

•#1 attack vector

$_GET

•Associative array corresponding to the query string

•Use this for READ ONLY data

$_POST

•Associative array that corresponds to form POSTs

•Use this when you will be modifying something on the server

•Array keys correspond to HTML input names

$_POST

$_SERVER

•Contains environment information

•Contains information about the HTTP request used to access this page

Sessions

•Keep track of info about your user

•Each user gets an ID and a cookie

•Actual session data is stored on the server

•Low security but easy

Using Sessions

•Call session_start()

•Use $_SESSION superglobal to get and set data

•Sessions expire when the browser is closed (you can configure this)

Session Demo

Dates & Times•Dates & times are relative to the

timezone of your server

•time() - Unix Timestamp

•date() - format a date string

•mktime() - get a specific unix timestamp

•strtotime() - convert an english-ish string to a timestamp

extract()

•Registers all the keys in an array as variables

•Use extreme with caution

Let’s buildsomething real