Re: Logging visitors path and presenting this to visitors

On Fri, 2006-02-17 at 23:47, Peter Lauri wrote: > Hi, > > I am about to create a feature that will help the visitor in his/her > navigation of the page. I want to store the visitors last 10 pages that was > visited so that this person easily can go back to a page he was at before, > without using the BACK button. I see two solutions to this, but I am not > sure on witch one to choose. > > 1. Create a session variable that contains the last 10 pages and update that > variable for every page he/she visits. > > 2. Have a database table that contains this information that is related to > the session ID. > > I am concerned that 2 will take resources from the server, but I would use > an already created link to the database. So maybe the inserts and selects > are neglectable? > > Number 2 can also be extended to an even better solution, when the user > comes back, the data can be recovered if we set a cookie for this. > > However 1 is much easier to implement, but 2 can be extended to better > functionality. > > Witch one would you choose? It's volatile data that you have no desire to keep between sessions (otherwise you wouldn't link it to the session) in which case unless there's a LOT of it there's no point using another table -- especially since it sounds like it will be loaded on every page. If you want maintainability, use a nice associative array structure that can easily be adapted later. Cheers, Rob. -- .------------------------------------------------------------. | InterJinn Application Framework - http://www.interjinn.com | :------------------------------------------------------------: | An application and templating framework for PHP. Boasting | | a powerful, scalable system for accessing system services | | such as forms, properties, sessions, and caches. InterJinn | | also provides an extremely flexible architecture for | | creating re-usable components quickly and easily. | `------------------------------------------------------------'