Magento – How to set a custom Magento session variable outside of Magento

magento-1.9PHPsession

The Magento System is in "web/shop". How do I set a session variable outside of it (e.g. in "web/index.php")? And how do I read it inside of Magento (e.g. in "web/shop/app/…")?

The scenario is the following:
A user visits a landing page (e.g. "web/lp/example.php"). Dependent on the landing page, certain contents in "web/shop" must be customized only for that session.
So a session variable must be set in "web/lp/example.php" to be read later in the shop.

Thanks for your help!

Best Answer

Try to insert in your index file (outside of Magento):

require_once 'path/to/your/app/Mage.php';
Mage::app();
Mage::getSingleton('core/session', ['name' => 'frontend']);

It will give you an access to Magento core functionality like sessions etc. After that you will be able to set your custom variable

Mage::getSingleton('core/session')->setMyVariable('Some value');

Then simply call anywhere in Magento:

Mage::getSingleton('core/session')->getMyVariable();

Related Solutions

Magento 1 Cart Session – How to Empty Cart or Clear Session Externally

This one should work as it removes all items from the current quote:

Mage::getSingleton('checkout/cart')->truncate();

But you need to save it afterwards:

Mage::getSingleton('checkout/cart')->save();

By the way, you can remove the following line:

$resource = Mage::getSingleton('core/resource');

since you don't use the variable and instantiating this singleton doesn't do anything in particular.

Session Validation Failure in Magento 1 EE v1.14.3.x and CE 1.9.3.x – How to Fix

After some advanced debugging, session tracing and thinking about all that magic I was able to reproduce the problem and understand the reason for it. I prepared a little timing illustration, you can see it below.

red flag is the moment of user login and session creation
blue flag is the moment when user opens catalog page, let's assume it is a category page which is opened.
green flag is the moment where user submits the order (/sales/order/save/... request)

Here is how to reproduce:

Before you start: Set your PHP session timeout and Magento cookie timeout both to be 1440 which is a default PHP value.
Kill all your cookies or open the incognito tab.
Go to your Magento shop and login (see Flag 1)
Go through catalog and add some products to the cart (Flag 2)
Go through the checkout and submit an order. Note the time when you did it. (Flag 3)
Go through catalog and add some products to the cart (Flag 4)
Keep refreshing your cart page or going through catalog pages so long that the timeout which you have configured for magento cookies expires (Flags 5-6). Note that time between Flag 7 and Flag 3 should be bigger than the cookie timeout.
Go through the checkout and submit an order (Flag 7). The order submission will fail due to the exception described in my question above.

Reason:

There are certain sessions which are only instantiated on given requests, e.g. Mage_Rss_Model_Session is only instantiated during the actual checkout and not while browsing through catalog. At the same time session expiry timestamp is only set when session was instantiated. That means that if there was enough time between two checkouts and the session was not killed meanwhile (because user logged out or cookie expired) the new Magento code will consider that session as not passing validation and will throw an exception, which sounds somehow strange to me.

How to fix:

Well, I have few options:

Wait till Magento reacts on that and reconsiders that code.
Remove this code meanwhile.
Try setting Magento cookie timeout to 0 if that is an option for you.

How did I figure it out:

I started with adding the following to the original code of Mage_Core_Model_Session_Abstract_Varien

Mage::log(
    sprintf(
        'useValidateSessionExpire fail "%s" "%d" "%d" "%s" "%s" "%s"',
        print_r($sessionData[self::VALIDATOR_SESSION_EXPIRE_TIMESTAMP], 1),
        time(),
        $this->_time,
        get_class($this),
        session_name(),
        session_id()
    ),
    Zend_Log::DEBUG,
    'session-validation.log',
    true
);

it gave me a good insight about affected classes and their correlation and how much session were expired. But that was not explaining why it happens and which user actions lead to the problem.

Then I started thinking on how can I trace all changes to session data and came across this question https://superuser.com/questions/368231/automatic-versioning-upon-file-change-modify-create-delete I decided to give a try to git and incron combination, but after I implemented it and tested in sandbox, I realized that I will run out of disk space really fast in production.

I decided to build a small PHP script which will decode session data and write logs for each sesssion. This script was called by incron

<?php
//log-session-data-change.php

$sessionLogStoragePath = '/var/www/html/logged-session-storage/';

$sessionFilePath = $argv[1];
$sessionOperationType = $argv[2];
$sessionFileName = basename($sessionFilePath);

session_start();
session_decode(file_get_contents($sessionFilePath));

$logString = sprintf(
  '"%s","%s","%s",""' . PHP_EOL,
  date(DateTime::COOKIE),
  $sessionOperationType,
  $sessionFileName
);

if (file_exists($sessionFilePath)) {
  session_start();
  session_decode(file_get_contents($sessionFilePath));

  foreach ($_SESSION as $name => $data) {
    $value = '<empty>';
    if (isset($data['_session_validator_data']) && isset($data['_session_validator_data']['session_expire_timestamp'])) {
      $value = $data['_session_validator_data']['session_expire_timestamp'];
    }
    $logString .= sprintf(
      '"","","","%s","%s"' . PHP_EOL,
      $name,
      $value
    );
  }
}

file_put_contents($sessionLogStoragePath . $sessionFileName, $logString, FILE_APPEND);

and here is the corresponding incrontab entry

/var/www/html/magento-doc-root/var/session IN_MODIFY,IN_CREATE,IN_DELETE,IN_MOVE /usr/bin/php /var/www/html/log-session-data-change.php $@/$# $%

sample output

"Wednesday, 05-Apr-2017 18:09:06 CEST","IN_MODIFY","sess_94rfglnua0phncmp98hbr3k524",""
"","","","core","1491408665"
"","","","customer_base","1491408665"
"","","","catalog","1491408665"
"","","","checkout","1491408665"
"","","","reports","1491408494"
"","","","store_default","1491408665"
"","","","rss","1491408524"
"","","","admin","1491408524"

P.S.:

Current versions of both

skin/frontend/enterprise/default/js/opcheckout.js 
src/skin/frontend/base/default/js/opcheckout.js

are not able to handle the exception above during the AJAX request. They display literally nothing to the user, while user effectively gets logged out!

P.P.S.:

apparently Magento CE 1.9.3.x versions are also affected, see https://github.com/OpenMage/magento-mirror/blame/magento-1.9/app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Session/Abstract/Varien.php

P.P.P.S.:

When I said "Remove this code meanwhile." I meant excluding the following block

if ($this->useValidateSessionExpire()
    && isset($sessionData[self::VALIDATOR_SESSION_EXPIRE_TIMESTAMP])
    && $sessionData[self::VALIDATOR_SESSION_EXPIRE_TIMESTAMP] < time() ) {
    return false;
} else {
    $this->_data[self::VALIDATOR_KEY][self::VALIDATOR_SESSION_EXPIRE_TIMESTAMP]
        = $validatorData[self::VALIDATOR_SESSION_EXPIRE_TIMESTAMP];
}

you can do that with so many ways, including:

Simply deleting that bit from the file
Commenting it out
Returning before it
Making $this->useValidateSessionExpire() return true
...
It is programming - be creative ;)

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Magento 1 Cart Session – How to Empty Cart or Clear Session Externally

Session Validation Failure in Magento 1 EE v1.14.3.x and CE 1.9.3.x – How to Fix

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