sessions and cookies

Anon

i have been trying to figure out a way to use php4's native session managemenet functionality without relying on cookies, and just when i thought i had it whipped, i realize that it's not working for some reason. i am not using tran-sid, but rather appending the urls via a custom function that automatically appends the SID to the url only if a search engine is not accessing the page. it should work fine even if you turn cookies off on your browser, but it doesnt. ive tried setting use_cookies to 0, but then sessions doent work at all. is it actually possible to run php4 sessions without cookies?
thnks.

Anon

Yes it is. I am using sessions and it works well with or without cookies. I to am manually adding .SID to the urls.

Try adding the .SID wothout compensating for the SEs and see if that works. It is possible that routine is causing your problems.

For the most part, SEs will follow a url upto the search param '?', some will not, but I believe most do.

Also you need to be sure that session_start() is called for each script you are using. I call it from the main script, which then includes all subsequent script files, that way I only need to call session_start() from a single file and it applies to all files called up.

Anon

thanks for the response. heres the problem i seem to be having:

if i activate trans-sid, when a user first accesses the site, all of the links on the first page they access will be appended with: ?PHPSESSID=1234123412341234

because i am not using trans-sid, , all of the links on the first page they access will be appended with: ?PHPSESSID=

The value of PHPSESSID is not added until the user clicks on a link to another page, which is when it takes on a value, and i have discovered that this method requires cookie functionality to be on.

so it seems that the only way to avoid relying on cookies is to use trans-sid. this can't be true, though. any thoughts?