setting session id for first visit

rubyonrails-talk
1

I am logging web visits with a before_filter on the application controller. The issue I'm having is that the initial visit does not return a session id. I'm using the SqlSessionStore and the function MysqlSession.find_session(session.session_id) to retrieve the session id. If it doesn't exist I use a -1. So looking in my visits table the initial visit always has -1 for the session id and the rest of the visits contain a valid session id for that visitor.

I tried putting the logging of visits in the after filter but that didn't seem to work. Is this something that I can correct or is that just the way it is with sessions?

Thanks, Gunner

2

It makes sense that the initial visit would not have a session id because depending on where you are assigning it, you might be logging the variable before setting it.

Also, you don't really need to hang on to the session details when logging web visits. Unless you have a special reason to, i wouldn't track any of the session details, they can easily be crated and compromised by scripts anyway. Try to keep session data to a minimum.

You might need to show some code if this doesn't help.

Kent

gwgeller wrote:

3

Kent,    I guess I really haven't thought it through, but my original purpose was to group a visit using the session id as opposed to an ip which could potentially be the same for two visitors. You mentioned where I set the session id, but I don't do it, SqlSessionStore does it for me, but I'm curious has to how that works. Do you know when the session would be set?

4

At work we do something similar, although we dont have issues with the session_id using ActiveRecordStore. One approach you could take would be to create a new object (Visitor), and store the visitor.id in the session. Then use the before filter to load that Visitor on each request. Then, create an Event associated with that visitor for each request (this allows you to have multiple event_types). Then when doing your queries you can do visitor.events to see what each person did. This approach allows us to clean the session table out every few days so it doesnt get to slow. The visitor table only gets written to once for each person and then is read only going forward.