Store Selected User Info in Database

Question

Using Symfony 1.4.x (with Propel), I've been given a task that requires me to share specific user info with multiple external systems. This is currently stored as a session (in memory) attribute, but I need to get it into a database so that I can create an API that will provide that info to authorized consumers.

I'd rather not overhaul the system to store all session data in the database (unless it's trivial and can handle namespaces), but I can't find any information on a recommended way for the myUser class to write data to the database. Is it possible to do this since the class doesn't have a model, per se (that I'm aware of)? Are there any recommended solutions or best practices for doing this?

Thanks.

UPDATE

If I were to boil this all the way down to its bare essentials, I guess the key question is this: What's the "best" way to read from/write to a database from the myUser class? Or, alternatively, is there another path that's recommended to accomplish the same end result?

Answer 1

Will storing result of json_encodeing or serializeing of

$myUserInstance->getAttributeHolder()->getAll()

do the job?

Answer 2

In the absence of a good means of accessing a database from the myUser class, I opted for a slightly different path. I installed memcached in a location accessible by both apps and extended PHP's Memcached class to apply a few customizations. The apps can now share information by writing specially formatted keys to the memcached instance.

I opted not to overhaul my existing cache storage mechanism (why upset the apple cart?) and am reading from/writing to memcached selectively for information that truly needs to be shared.