Being busy

Wed 24th November 2004 09:25 EET

Lately, I've found it hard to find time for blogging. I guess the real reason is that I've done nothing worth to mention - just regular MidCOM site building and drinking coffee with our clients.

On the side note. There has been some discussion on how to sort and filter results in MidCOM at #midgard. The concensus is that we should have a generic enough classes/functions that would be used by every component - instead of each component using their own sorting/filtering code. However, the best, and proper, way to do this is still open. One of the biggest issues is how to tie sorting/filtering to MidCOM Datamanager layout schemas. As this would enable non-Midgard developers to configure their components and have them sorted properly without writing Midgard specific code.

Yet another woe is the MidCOM sessioning service that is currently incompatible with the NemeinAuthentication library. The problem is that when a MidCOM Template powered site, which uses NemeinAuthentication, has a user logged in, the sessioning service is unable to write to the $_SESSION superglobal. Obviously, this makes it pretty hard for new components like net.nemein.orders to fill in the customer's shopping cart.

The bottom line here is that the NemeinAuthentication does session_write_close after authentication procedure. Now, MidCOM sessioning service looks for session_id, finds it (as NemeinAuth already did session_start) but cannot write to it (as it's write closed), and yet PHP allows this. One would think that after the superglobal is closed one couldn't write to it at all, and PHP would return an error (or at least warning). It all ends to the fact that the data stored to the $_SESSION is lost after page redirection.

So, what I'm looking out for is that MidCOM should have a totally independent sessioning service. I'm still working on creating a working solution, without touching the NemeinAuthentication. So, I just report back later...