Quixote Session Management
==========================

HTTP was originally designed as a stateless protocol, meaning that every
request for a document or image was conducted in a separate TCP
connection, and that there was no way for a web server to tell if two
separate requests actually come from the same user.  It's no longer
necessarily true that every request is conducted in a separate TCP
connection, but HTTP is still fundamentally stateless.  However, there
are many applications where it is desirable or even essential to
establish a "session" for each user, ie. where all requests performed by
that user are somehow tied together on the server.

HTTP cookies were invented to address this requirement, and they are
still the best solution for establishing sessions on top of HTTP.  Thus,
the session management mechanism that comes with Quixote is
cookie-based.  (The most common alternative is to embed the session
identifier in the URL.  Since Quixote views the URL as a fundamental
part of the web user interface, a URL-based session management scheme is
considered un-Quixotic.)

For further reading: the standard for cookies that is approximately
implemented by most current browsers is RFC 2109; the latest version of
the standard is RFC 2965. 

In a nutshell, session management with Quixote works like this:

* when a user-agent first requests a page from a Quixote application
  that implements session management, Quixote creates a Session object
  and generates a session ID (a random 128-bit number).  The Session
  object is attached to the current HTTPRequest object, so that
  application code involved in processing this request has access to
  the Session object.  The quixote.get_session() function provides
  uniform access to the current Session object.

* if, at the end of processing that request, the application code has
  stored any information in the Session object, Quixote saves the
  session in its SessionManager object for use by future requests and
  sends a session cookie, called ``QX_session`` by default, to the user.
  The session cookie contains the session ID encoded as a URL-safe
  base-64 string, and is included in the response headers, eg. ::

    Set-Cookie: QX_session="pJX1bU47T-6hbfjP2f5pPA"

  (You can instruct Quixote to specify the domain and path for
  URLs to which this cookie should be sent.)

* the user agent stores this cookie for future requests

* the next time the user agent requests a resource that matches the
  cookie's domain and path, it includes the ``QX_session`` cookie
  previously generated by Quixote in the request headers, eg.::

    Cookie: QX_session="pJX1bU47T-6hbfjP2f5pPA"

* while processing the request, Quixote decodes the session ID and
  looks up the corresponding Session object in its SessionManager.  If
  there is no such session, the session cookie is bogus or
  out-of-date, so Quixote raises SessionError; ultimately the user
  gets an error page.  Otherwise, the Session object is made
  available, through the get_session() function, as the application
  code processes the request.

There are two caveats to keep in mind before proceeding, one major and
one minor:

* Quixote's standard Session and SessionManager class do not
  implement any sort of persistence, meaning that all sessions
  disappear when the process handling web requests terminates.
  Thus, session management is completely useless with a plain
  CGI driver script unless you add some persistence to the mix;
  see "Session persistence" below for information.

* Quixote never expires sessions; if you want user sessions to
  be cleaned up after a period of inactivity, you will have to
  write code to do it yourself.


Session management demo
-----------------------

There's a simple demo of Quixote's session management in demo/altdemo.py.
If the durus (http://www.mems-exchange.org/software/durus/) package is
installed, the demo uses a durus database to store sessions, so sessions
will be preserved, even if you are running it with plain cgi. 

This particular application uses sessions to keep track of just two
things: the user's identity and the number of requests made in this
session.  The first is addressed by Quixote's standard Session class --
every Session object has a ``user`` attribute, which you can use for
anything you like.  In the session demo, we simply store a string, the
user's name, which is entered by the user.

Tracking the number of requests is a bit more interesting: from the
DemoSession class in altdemo.py::

    def __init__ (self, id):
        Session.__init__(self, id)
        self.num_requests = 0

    def start_request (self):
        Session.start_request(self)
        self.num_requests += 1

When the session is created, we initialize the request counter; and
when we start processing each request, we increment it.  Using the
session information in the application code is simple. If you want the
value of the user attribute of the current session, just call
get_user().  If you want some other attribute or method Use
get_session() to get the current Session if you need access to other
attributes (such as ``num_requests`` in the demo) or methods of the
current Session instance.

Note that the Session class initializes the user attribute to None,
so get_user() will return None if no user has been identified for
this session.  Application code can use this to change behavior,
as in the following::

        if not get_user():
            content += htmltext('<p>%s</p>' % href('login', 'login'))
        else:
            content += htmltext(
                '<p>Hello, %s.</p>') % get_user()
            content += htmltext('<p>%s</p>' % href('logout', 'logout'))


Note that we must quote the user's name, because they are free to enter
anything they please, including special HTML characters like ``&`` or
``<``.

Of course, ``session.user`` will never be set if we don't set it
ourselves.  The code that processes the login form is just this (from
``login()`` in ``demo/altdemo.py``) ::

        if get_field("name"):
            session = get_session()
            session.set_user(get_field("name")) # This is the important part.

This is obviously a very simple application -- we're not doing any
verification of the user's input.  We have no user database, no
passwords, and no limitations on what constitutes a "user name".  A real
application would have all of these, as well as a way for users to add
themselves to the user database -- ie. register with your web site.


Configuring the session cookie
------------------------------

Quixote allows you to configure several aspects of the session cookie
that it exchanges with clients.  First, you can set the name of the
cookie; this is important if you have multiple independent Quixote
applications running on the same server.  For example, the config file
for the first application might have ::

  SESSION_COOKIE_NAME = "foo_session"

and the second application might have ::

  SESSION_COOKIE_NAME = "bar_session"

Next, you can use ``SESSION_COOKIE_DOMAIN`` and ``SESSION_COOKIE_PATH``
to set the cookie attributes that control which requests the cookie is
included with.  By default, these are both ``None``, which instructs
Quixote to send the cookie without ``Domain`` or ``Path`` qualifiers.
For example, if the client requests ``/foo/bar/`` from
www.example.com, and Quixote decides that it must set the session
cookie in the response to that request, then the server would send ::

  Set-Cookie: QX_session="pJX1bU47T-6hbfjP2f5pPA"

in the response headers.  Since no domain or path were specified with
that cookie, the browser will only include the cookie with requests to
www.example.com for URIs that start with ``/foo/bar/``.

If you want to ensure that your session cookie is included with all
requests to www.example.com, you should set ``SESSION_COOKIE_PATH`` in your
config file::

  SESSION_COOKIE_PATH = "/"

which will cause Quixote to set the cookie like this::

  Set-Cookie: QX_session="pJX1bU47T-6hbfjP2f5pPA"; Path="/"

which will instruct the browser to include that cookie with *all*
requests to www.example.com.

However, think carefully about what you set ``SESSION_COOKIE_PATH`` to
-- eg. if you set it to "/", but all of your Quixote code is under "/q/"
in your server's URL-space, then your user's session cookies could be
unnecessarily exposed.  On shared servers where you don't control all of
the code, this is especially dangerous; be sure to use (eg.) ::

  SESSION_COOKIE_PATH = "/q/"

on such servers.  The trailing slash is important; without it, your
session cookies will be sent to URIs like ``/qux`` and ``/qix``, even if
you don't control those URIs.

If you want to share the cookie across servers in your domain,
eg. www1.example.com and www2.example.com, you'll also need to set
``SESSION_COOKIE_DOMAIN``:

  SESSION_COOKIE_DOMAIN = ".example.com"

Finally, note that the ``SESSION_COOKIE_*`` configuration variables
*only* affect Quixote's session cookie; if you set your own cookies
using the ``HTTPResponse.set_cookie()`` method, then the cookie sent to
the client is completely determined by that ``set_cookie()`` call.

See RFCs 2109 and 2965 for more information on the rules browsers are
supposed to follow for including cookies with HTTP requests.


Writing the session class
-------------------------

You will almost certainly have to write a custom session class for your
application by subclassing Quixote's standard Session class.  Every
custom session class has two essential responsibilities:

* initialize the attributes that will be used by your application

* override the ``has_info()`` method, so the session manager knows when
  it must save your session object

The first one is fairly obvious and just good practice.  The second is
essential, and not at all obvious.  The has_info() method exists because
SessionManager does not automatically hang on to all session objects;
this is a defense against clients that ignore cookies, making your
session manager create lots of session objects that are just used once.
As long as those session objects are not saved, the burden imposed by
these clients is not too bad -- at least they aren't sucking up your
memory, or bogging down the database that you save session data to.
Thus, the session manager uses has_info() to know if it should hang on
to a session object or not: if a session has information that must be
saved, the session manager saves it and sends a session cookie to the
client.

For development/testing work, it's fine to say that your session objects
should always be saved::

  def has_info (self):
      return 1

The opposite extreme is to forget to override ``has_info()`` altogether,
in which case session management most likely won't work: unless you
tickle the Session object such that the base ``has_info()`` method
returns true, the session manager won't save the sessions that it
creates, and Quixote will never drop a session cookie on the client.

In a real application, you need to think carefully about what data to
store in your sessions, and how ``has_info()`` should react to the
presence of that data.  If you try and track something about every
single visitor to your site, sooner or later one of those a
broken/malicious client that ignores cookies and ``robots.txt`` will
come along and crawl your entire site, wreaking havoc on your Quixote
application (or the database underlying it).


Session persistence
-------------------

Keeping session data across requests is all very nice, but in the real
world you want that data to survive across process termination.  With
CGI, this is essential, since each process serves exactly one request
and then terminates.  With other execution mechanisms, though, it's
still important -- you don't want to lose all your session data just
because your long-lived server process was restarted, or your server
machine was rebooted.

However, every application is different, so Quixote doesn't provide any
built-in mechanism for session persistence.  Instead, it provides a
number of hooks, most in the SessionManager class, that let you plug in
your preferred persistence mechanism.

The first and most important hook is in the SessionManager
constructor: you can provide an alternate mapping object that
SessionManager will use to store session objects in.  By default,
SessionManager uses an ordinary dictionary; if you provide a mapping
object that implements persistence, then your session data will
automatically persist across processes.

The second hook (two hooks, really) apply if you use a transactional
persistence mechanism to provide your SessionManager's mapping.  The
``altdemo.py`` script does this with Durus, if the durus package is
installed, but you could also use ZODB or a relational database for
this purpose.  The hooks make sure that session (and other) changes
get committed or aborted at the appropriate times.  SessionManager
provides two methods for you to override: ``forget_changes()`` and
``commit_changes()``.  ``forget_changes()`` is called by
SessionPublisher whenever a request crashes, ie. whenever your
application raises an exception other than PublishError.
``commit_changes()`` is called for requests that complete
successfully, or that raise a PublishError exception. You'll have to
use your own SessionManager subclass if you need to take advantage of
these hooks for transactional session persistence.

The third available hook is the Session's is_dirty() method.  This is
used when your mapping class uses a more primitive storage mechanism,
as, for example, the standard 'shelve' module, which provides a
mapping object on top of a DBM or Berkeley DB file::

  import shelve
  sessions = shelve.open("/tmp/quixote-sessions")
  session_manager = SessionManager(session_mapping=sessions)

If you use one of these relatively simple persistent mapping types,
you'll also need to override ``is_dirty()`` in your Session class.
That's in addition to overriding ``has_info()``, which determines if a
session object is *ever* saved; ``is_dirty()`` is only called on
sessions that have already been added to the session mapping, to see
if they need to be "re-added".  The default implementation always
returns false, because once an object has been added to a normal
dictionary, there's no need to add it again.  However, with simple
persistent mapping types like shelve, you need to store the object
again each time it changes.  Thus, ``is_dirty()`` should return true
if the session object needs to be re-written.  For a simple, naive,
but inefficient implementation, making is_dirty an alias for
``has_info()`` will work -- that just means that once the session has
been written once, it will be re-written on every request.


