Question

18

Automatically re-direct a user when session Times out or goes idle

rated 0 times [ 22] [ 4] / answers: 1 / hits: 17258 / 15 Years ago, tue, june 16, 2009, 12:00:00

I want to have a timer going to run every 3 minutes on the page (javascript), to detect if a php session ($_SESSION) has timed out... and if so, redirect them automatically.

A good example would be, a user logs in and runs up stairs, and never comes back down... I want the javascript to log them out with a simple redirect...

Is this possible? and how would I do such a thing? I am using PHP and JavaScript.

What Rob Kennedy said below is exactly what I am looking for:

...when the session times out,
the browser should be told to navigate away from the current page.
Some banks do this after a period of inactivity, for example.

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victorw

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3 Years ago

answered 15 Years ago theodore · Accepted Answer

You could use a simple meta refresh:

<meta http-equiv=refresh content=180;url=http://example.com/logout />

Or you implement a timeout with PHP:

session_start();

if (isset($_SESSION['LAST_REQUEST_TIME'])) {

    if (time() - $_SESSION['LAST_REQUEST_TIME'] > 180) {

        // session timed out, last request is longer than 3 minutes ago

        $_SESSION = array();

        session_destroy();

    }

}

$_SESSION['LAST_REQUEST_TIME'] = time();

Then you don’t need to check every 3 minutes if the session is still valid.