PHP Store User Data without Sessions

Question

Is there anyway to store users data such as userid, email, etc to be accessible from all pages of a website after they have logged in, but without using sessions or cookies?

For example:

class User
{
  var $userid;
  var $username;
  var $email;

  .. methods..
}

after they login at login.php

$currentUser = new User($_POST['username'])

now, how do I access $currentUser from another page, such as index.php if I shouldn't use sessions or cookies at all?

so that I could do the following in index.php:

if ($currentUser->userid > -1)
{
  echo "you are logged in as: " . $currentUser->username;
}
else
{
  echo "click here to login";
}

i asked a similar question before, here, but the answers didn't fulfill my needs.

Answer 1

It's a little far-fetched, I admit:

• http://panopticlick.eff.org/

Edit: The site seem to be popular these days, they will be back online tomorrow. Basically, the study says, that browsers alone are able to provide fingerprint-like data to their vis-à-vis.

Answer 2

http://drawlogic.com/2008/01/10/howto-sharedobjects-for-local-storage-as3/ ;)

Answer 3

If you're over-the-top gung-ho with regards to OOP and refuse to directly interact with sessions/cookies, I'd strongly suggest you simply encapsulate sessions instead of remaking them. Even something as simple as this:

//oopsess.php
<?php
    class Session{
        ...
    }

    session_start();

    function getSession(){
        //return the session if one exists
        if (isset($_SESSION['sessionObject']))
            return $_SESSION['sessionObject'];

        //otherwise save and return a new one
        $_SESSION['sessionObject']=new Session();
        return $_SESSION['sessionObject'];
    }
?>

Easily adaptable if you want to store the data clientside - in a cookie - instead of just storing the session id client side (which is what this does).

Edit: Also, teasing aside with regards to OOP, if your code is all very OOP, this is actually a genuinely good way to keep your code clean - not just a way to satisfy your OOP-hungry cravings as I implied above ;)

Answer 4

Sev Said "One idea to consider which I've seen done before is storing a session id as a cookie and keeping the session in your db. The cool thing about doing that is it allows admin full and easy control over sessions. Plus you can implement neat things like gmail's "log out other sessions" feature. Food for thought :)"

Just a note that we do this and it works great.