Login not working in Silex with PostgreSQL

Question

I'm developing a project with a small client area with the Silex framework. I want to store the session in database using the SessionServiceProvider and PdoSessionHandler but when I try to login with a test account the session is written in the database but the login is not done correctly and I get the login page in a loop. Also I'm getting the following error in the error log

Uncaught exception 'PDOException' with message 'SQLSTATE[22021]: Character not in repertoire: 7 ERROR:  invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8"

The sessions table looks like this (got it from the Silex documentation page ):

CREATE TABLE sessions (
    sess_id VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
    sess_value TEXT NOT NULL,
    sess_time INTEGER NOT NULL,
    PRIMARY KEY(sess_id)
);

Anyone can help?

Answer 1

I found myself with the same error some time ago, looks like the silex documentation is incorrect for PostgreSQL, the sess_value field should be a BYTEA type field because the session data can contain characters that are not accepted in UTF-8 like the NULL character 0x00 .

Also as Silex uses the Symfony2 components for storing the session in database another field should be added, sess_lifetime that will contain the lifetime of the database session.

So the definition should be:

CREATE TABLE sessions (
    sess_id VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
    sess_value BYTEA NOT NULL,
    sess_time INTEGER NOT NULL,
    sess_lifetime INTEGER NOT NULL,
    PRIMARY KEY(sess_id)
);