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

Don't know if this way is the better way to store your data temporary. You can use this to instantiate a session object :

$session = $this->get("session");

Don't forget the 'use' in your controller :

use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Session;

Then, the session starts automatically when you want to set a variable like :

$session->set("product name","computer");

This is based on the use of the Session class, easy to understand. Commonly definitions :

get(string $name, mixed $default = null)

Returns an attribute.

set(string $name, mixed $value)

Sets an attribute.

has(string $name)

Checks if an attribute is defined.

Also, take a look to the other ways to store your data : Multiple SessionStorage

Answer 2

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)

Answer 3

You can make your entity Serializable and serialize the entity object and save to session and then retrieve in other page using unserialize(). There is one caveat, for an entity that exists in the db Doctrine2 will mark the retrieved/unserialized entity as detached. You have to call $em->merge($entity); in this case.