I decided to add this story to answer any questions that come up about CakePHP from my site.  This one was inspired by mariusg who posted a question about CakePHP to the site. If you're sitting on a good broadband line and tend to flit back and forth between websites a lot, you know how useful a "remember me" function can be on a commonly-used site, and of course benefits your users if you're using it on your own. Hopefully the community (and anyone drifting through on Google searches) will find this useful!


 mariusg: How did you do the "remember me thing" when you try to login. I mean, the code that integrates with cakephp.

 nlofaso: That function is created by using cookies, first changing the login function to include the capability for writing the cookies, I changed what my cookie names are, but here's what the login function looks like in my users controller, the keys are to add a remember me check box to the users login form, then in the controller, check for the checkbox to be selected in the controller, and set the cookie accordingly:

function login() {
        if ($this->Auth->User()){
           
            if (!empty($this->data)){
                if (!($this->data['User']['remember'])){
                    $this->Cookie->del('User');
                } else {
                    $cookie = array();
                    $cookie['account'] = $this->data['User']['account'];
                    $cookie['pass'] = $this->data['User']['pass'];
                    $this->Cookie->write('User',$cookie,true,'+2 weeks');
                   
                }
                unset($this->data['User']['remember']);
            }
            $this->redirect($this->Auth->redirect());
            exit();
        }
    }

I also added to the app_controller the code to check for a valid cookie for the site.  I read the cookie and if there isn't a valid user logged in, I call the function in my model to check for a valid user:

$cookie = $this->Cookie->read('User'); 

            if (is_array($cookie) && !$this->Auth->user()) 
            {
            $loginUser = $this->User->checkLogin($cookie['account'], $cookie['pass']);
            if (isset($loginUser)){
                $loginSuccess = $this->Auth->login($loginUser['User']['id']);
                if (!$loginSuccess){
                    $this->Cookie->del('User');
                }
            }
            } 


In the User model, I added the following function to see if there is a user who has the same data as found in the cookie created.  I find the record in the DB that contains the users account and once I find it, I compare it to the password stored by the cookie, for an additional layer of security:

function checkLogin($account, $passhash) 
         { 
            $user = $this->findByAccount($account);
           
            if ($user) 
            {
                if ($user['User']['pass'] == $passhash)
                    return $user;
            } 
            return null;
         } 

Thats basically how you add the "Remember Me" check box to a login page.