Setting Cookies

Anon

I am translating the codes I have written previously with ASP to PHP. And somehow found a problem in dealing with cookies.

I have a login script which sets a cookie and from this script, it should "redirect" to a certain page in which the cookie must be visible. With ASP, this can be achieved by using th Response.Cookies and Response.Redirect functions. And I found PHP functions which I expected to accomplish such functions--the setcookies and header functions. But I also read from the PHP manual that, "Cookies will not become visible until the next loading of a page that the cookie should be visible for. " How can I set the cookie immediately after the log-in and redirect it to a certain page?

Anon

SetCookie("cookiename","content",optional other stuff);
Header("Location: other_url");

Works great.

Anon

I believe I have already tried you suggestion, but when the login script redirects to some page, as specified in the header function, the cookie is still not visible to that page.

Here is a fragment of the code that I used:

if($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) SetCookie("CID", $row["MemberID"]);
else
SetCookie("CID","0");

mysql_free_result($result);
mysql_close($oConnection);

header("Location: " . $linkFrom);

The variable $linkFrom is a parameter to this login script that identifies the page to which the login script must redirect to.

Anon

Unsure if this is a bug or feature, but I've got your very same problem, and solved it like this:

set the cookie and then:
echo "<meta http-equiv=\"Refresh\" content=\"0;url=./page.php\">";

One note; I've been testing Netscape 6, and NS6 didn't like to simply echo the meta, so NS only outputs it on screen. I solved this by surrounding the meta with html tags (but those get escaped on phpbuilder's forum).

It seems the cookie doesn't get set if you follow it directly by a header redirect.

Anon

I tried ur suggestion and it worked! Thank you so much! I agree, this might be some kind of a bug because most examples that I've read about setting cookies are written just the way I did it, but just wouldn't work. Again, thanks a lot!

Anon

Glad to be of help, PHP manual has this to say about it:

Common Pitfalls:
Cookies will not become visible until the next loading of a page that the cookie should be visible for.

I might read this the wrong way, but in my opinion, redirecting with a header function, after setting the cookie should make the cookie visible on the next page, since that is infact the "next loading of a page". This is not the case.

Might be platform related (I use NT4 on IIS) and I guess you are too. This is what Microsoft would call a "feature" not a bug ;-)

Anon

I believe you're right about this problem being platform-related. A colleague has read that the setcookie-header tandem works great with Linux-Apache environment.