4.8.1 Classes

Session(req[, sid, secret, timeout, lock, lockfile]): This function queries the MPM and based on that returns either a new instance of DbmSession or MemorySession. It takes same arguments as BaseSession.
MemorySession will be used if the MPM is threaded and not forked (such is the case on Windows), or if it threaded, forked, but only one process is allowed (the worker MPM can be configured to run this way). In all other cases DbmSession is used.

class BaseSession(req[, sid, secret, timeout, lock, lockfile])

This class is meant to be used as a base class for other classes that implement a session storage mechanism. req is a required reference to a mod_python request object.

BaseSession is a subclass of dict. Data can be stored and retrieved from the session by using it as a dictionary.

sid is an optional session id; if provided, such a session must already exist, otherwise it is ignored and a new session with a new sid is created. If sid is not provided, the object will attempt to look at cookies for session id. If a sid is found in cookies, but it is not previously known or the session has expired, then a new sid is created. Whether a session is ``new'' can be determined by calling the is_new() method.

Cookies generated by sessions will have a path attribute which is calculated by comparing the server DocumentRoot and the directory in which the PythonHandler directive currently in effect was specified. E.g. if document root is /a/b/c and PythonHandler was specified in /a/b/c/d/e, the path will be set to /d/e. You can force a specific path by using ApplicationPath option ("PythonOption ApplicationPath /my/path" in server configuration).

When a secret is provided, BaseSession will use SignedCookie when generating cookies thereby making the session id almost impossible to fake. The default is to use plain Cookie (though even if not signed, the session id is generated to be very difficult to guess).

A session will timeout if it has not been accessed for more than timeout, which defaults to 30 minutes. An attempt to load an expired session will result in a ``new'' session.

The lock argument (defaults to 1) indicates whether locking should be used. When locking is on, only one session object with a particular session id can be instantiated at a time. lockfile is the name of a file to be used for inter-process locks.

A session is in ``new'' state when the session id was just generated, as opposed to being passed in via cookies or the sid argument.

is_new()

Returns 1 if this session is new. A session will also be ``new'' after an attempt to instantiate an expired or non-existent session. It is important to use this method to test whether an attempt to instantiate a session has succeeded, e.g.:

sess = Session(req)
if sess.is_new():
    # redirect to login
    util.redirect(req, 'http://www.mysite.com/login')

id(): Returns the session id.

created(): Returns the session creation time in seconds since beginning of epoch.

last_accessed(): Returns last access time in seconds since beginning of epoch.

timeout(): Returns session timeout interval in seconds.

set_timeout(secs): Set timeout to secs.

invalidate(): This method will remove the session from the persistent store and also place a header in outgoing headers to invalidate the session id cookie.

load(): Load the session values from storage.

save(): This method writes session values to storage.

delete(): Remove the session from storage.

init_lock(): This method initializes the session lock. There is no need to ever call this method, it is intended for subclasses that wish to use an alternative locking mechanism.

lock(): Locks this session. If the session is already locked by another thread/process, wait until that lock is released. There is no need to call this method if locking is handled automatically (default).

unlock(): Unlocks this session. (Same as lock() - when locking is handled automatically (default), there is no need to call this method).

cleanup(): This method is for subclasses to implement session storage cleaning mechanism (i.e. deleting expired sessions, etc.). It will be called at random, the chance of it being called is controlled by CLEANUP_CHANCE Session module variable (default 1000). This means that cleanups will be ordered at random and there is 1 in 1000 chance of it happening. Subclasses implementing this method should not perform the (potentially time consuming) cleanup operation in this method, but should instead use req.register_cleanup to register a cleanup which will be executed after the request has been processed.

class MemorySession(req, [, sid, secret, dbmtype, timeout])

This class provides session storage using a global dictionary. This class provides by far the best performance, but cannot be used in a multi-process configuration, and also consumes memory for every active session.

class DbmSession(req, [, dbm, sid, secret, dbmtype, timeout])

This class provides session storage using a dbm file. Generally, dbm access is very fast, and most dbm implementations memory-map files for faster access, which makes their performance nearly as fast as direct shared memory access.

dbm is the name of the dbm file (the file must be writable by the httpd process). This file is not deleted when the server process is stopped (a nice side benefit of this is that sessions can survive server restarts). By default the session information is stored in a dbmfile named mp_sess.dbm and stored in a temporary directory returned by tempfile.gettempdir() standard library function. It can be overridden by setting PythonOption SessionDbm filename.

The implementation uses Python anydbm module, which will default to dbhash on most systems. If you need to use a specific dbm implementation (e.g. gdbm), you can pass that module as dbmtype.