Remove / Merge Session After Subsequent Login

Just to provide more clarification on how I'm obtaining user's last account activity, I'm using an 'Online' model which updates the user model on every request (http://laravel.io/forum/03-03-2014-sentry-3-users-online#reply-11403).

Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

So select the online users in the table users from their last activity

@pmall Thanks for the response. I have already had success creating the query to obtain all users from the 'sessions' table based on their 'last_activity' (600 seconds or less); however, the main issue I'm experiencing is that multiple sessions are being created when a user signs in from multiple locations, which causes duplicate entries in the list of online users due to multiple sessions existing in the 'sessions' table.

Where I understand it's expected behaviour for multiple entries to appear in the 'sessions' table for each user, I would like to limit this to one session per user. Is this possible, or are there any best practices that I'm overlooking here?

You just said you update the user model with their last activity on every request. So select your online users from the users table, not the session table.

$online_users = User::where('last_activity', '>', now() - 10min)->get();

Why do you want to get this from the session table ?

Or another idea :

$online_users = User::select('users.*')
    ->join('sessions', 'sessions.user_id', '=', 'users.id')
    ->where('sessions.last_activity', '>', now() - 10min)
    ->groupBy('users.id')
    ->get();