Salesforce Session variables, set and get variables in Session

Question

I  want to be able to read / write some variables to the current session in my Salesforce site pages.

I have a site built using Salesforce Sites, I need to store/retrieve some values across all the pages (consider that I am building something similar to a shopping cart). However I cant find any good example on how to read and write variables to the session (anonymous user).

I am using Visualforce pages with several controllers built in Apex.

Regards

Answer 1

Custom settings are basically cached at the application level. I'm not sure if I'd recommend that approach, but you might be able to get it to work.

If you create a Custom Setting named "SessionData", and add your custom fields (which symbolizes the data you want to store in session), you could save data to it like this:

Database.SaveResult result = Database.insert(new SessionData__c(YourFieldHere='Your value here etc'));

System.debug(result.getID());

Then you can use the resulting custom setting ID to store in a cookie. While custom settings can be obtained using normal SOQL, the major advantage is that the data is cached and can be accessed like this:

if (SessionData__c.getAll().containsKey('unique ID from cookie here'))

{

     System.debug(SessionData__c.getInstance('unique ID from cookie here').YourFieldHere);

}

Note: Custom settings aren't designed for this, so you'll need to periodically purge old custom settings data, as normal session management systems do.

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