How vBulletin handles sessions - integrating into main site

[poi@nwdnb]

I've currently got my forums running, and i've also built the main site on the same domain, that runs using ASP. The ASP pages check the forum cookies etc to verify that a user is logged in, and i have extended the vBulletin database to incorporate all the extra information to be displayed on the main site.

So i can do things like, on the main ASP site, run a query which checks how many people are browsing the forums (by looking at the session table) etc.

What I would like to do though, is to have the ASP page update the session table each time a user moves about the site, so that users who are just browsing the site, and have not visited the forum, appear online aswell.

Can anyone give me some pointers on the steps i should take to update the session table? I've looked through the PHP code and its quite complex, i'm not fussed about it recording WHERE the user is browsing (the session table stores URLs etc) - i just want it to show the user as online..

Any help greatly appreciated.

[Brad]

Im not very schooled in ASP, but, if you can include/require global.php in your asp pages somehow it will take care of everything for you

[poi@nwdnb]

Thanks for your reply, but i dont think i can make it work in that way. I'll have another look into it, but i cant see how i can call global.php and have the user interact with the updates it performs, without redirecting the user to global.php itself.

Can anyone help with the database transactions behind the sessions?

I'm still on version 2 of vBulletin by the way.

[Brad]

(keep in mind I speaking from my experance in php coding only )

well..i re read your post, and to my understanding your just looking to have the who's online update when a user is on your site pages. That way you will get the 'real' number of online users.

If you include global.php (from the /forum folder, not /forum/admin) it will check for sessions and do all the work of updating the table. However, im not sure if you can include .php scripts in a .asp page...

if that is so you can have a look at sessions.php (if you already have you know what a mess that file is! ). Ill take a peek in a minute and see if i cant extract the query's for you. For now i must eat breakfast and take a shower

[poi@nwdnb]

I can't include a .php script to be parsed, from within a ASP page;
I can, though, tell the ASP script to "get" global.php, but then it would be the webserver loading the script, as opposed to the users browser, so i dont think this would update anything.

I think i'm just gonna have to bite the dirt and try and work out how sessions.php works! :ermm: