Hi,
This is not a very regular scenario, but I had got one, where I had to make a user auto login when they are coming to my website via a newsletter, that I had sent to the website members. The flow is, first I create various email newsletters and distribute it among my website users by mailing them. The newsletters would contain a link back to my website. Now when the users click that link, they come back to my website. They have to enter few basic details such as the password, gender, date of birth etc. When they click next they get logged in to the website.
I am using Drupal 6.20 for this development. The users that I am talking about are basically drupal users as well, so I need to login them in Drupal framework as well. It is actually simpler than I had thought. In Drupal whenever a user logs in it creates a global variable, "$user", instead of session variables to store the details of the logged in users. So all I had to do is to overwrite that variable with the user details who needs to be logged in.
This is the code that I had used:
$user_details=db_fetch_array(db_query("select * from {users} where id=<USER_ID>"));
$user_details->hostname=$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
$user_details->timestamp=time();
$user_details->roles=array('4'=>'client');
global $user;
$user=$user_details;
Explanation:
The idea is very simple. You just need to overwrite the $user variable with that in the database. So I simply fetch all the details of the user and put it in the $user variable. But just by doing this will not do the job, I also need to assign few extra variables such as the hostname, timestamp and roles. Hostname and timestamp are pretty much easy and self explanatory. What is vital is the roles variable given as:
This is not a very regular scenario, but I had got one, where I had to make a user auto login when they are coming to my website via a newsletter, that I had sent to the website members. The flow is, first I create various email newsletters and distribute it among my website users by mailing them. The newsletters would contain a link back to my website. Now when the users click that link, they come back to my website. They have to enter few basic details such as the password, gender, date of birth etc. When they click next they get logged in to the website.
I am using Drupal 6.20 for this development. The users that I am talking about are basically drupal users as well, so I need to login them in Drupal framework as well. It is actually simpler than I had thought. In Drupal whenever a user logs in it creates a global variable, "$user", instead of session variables to store the details of the logged in users. So all I had to do is to overwrite that variable with the user details who needs to be logged in.
This is the code that I had used:
$user_details=db_fetch_array(db_query("select * from {users} where id=<USER_ID>"));
$user_details->hostname=$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
$user_details->timestamp=time();
$user_details->roles=array('4'=>'client');
global $user;
$user=$user_details;
Explanation:
The idea is very simple. You just need to overwrite the $user variable with that in the database. So I simply fetch all the details of the user and put it in the $user variable. But just by doing this will not do the job, I also need to assign few extra variables such as the hostname, timestamp and roles. Hostname and timestamp are pretty much easy and self explanatory. What is vital is the roles variable given as:
