Store objects in sessions Symfony 2

Question

I am writing a small e-shop application with Symfony 2 and I need some way to store the user\'s shopping cart in a session. I think using a database is not a good idea.

Answer 1

You can save the whole object into a session with Symfony. Just use (in a controller):

$this->get('session')->set('session_name', $object);

Beware: the object needs to be serializable. Otherwise, PHP crashes when loading the session on the start_session() function.

Just implement the \Serializable interface by adding serialize() and unserialize() method, like this:

public function serialize()
  {
    return serialize(
      [
        $this->property1,
        $this->property2,
      ]
    );
  }

  public function unserialize($serialized)
  {
    $data = unserialize($serialized);
    list(
      $this->property1, 
      $this->property2,
      ) = $data;
  }

Source: http://blog.ikvasnica.com/entry/storing-objects-into-a-session-in-symfony (my blogpost on this topic)