Set session key

Question

How can I change the session key used by a django session? I'd like to support multiple simultaneous sessions in the same browser by specifying an ID in the URL and then incorporating that ID in the session key.

I've tried simply:

request.session.session_key += key

But I get an AttributeError saying that I "can't set attribute".

Answer 1

You could achieve this by writing your own SessionMiddleware (based of Django's django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware) which supports looking up and storing multiple seperate sessions linked to the same user.

Have a look at the source of the SessionMiddlware, it seems that it quite simply gets a cookie by the name of 'sessionid' (by default), creates a enging.SessionStore instance and stores it as a 'session' attribute of the request instance.

You could theoretically do the same only getting/setting your own cookie names (i.e postfixed with the identifier passed in the request params), and store it in your own attribute (i.e request.custom_sessions) and then be able to use it wherever a request instance is available.