Sessions & Secure Servers

[Anon]

I am building a shopping cart system using sessions.

However, my webspace is set up so that the secure server is actually a different URL (e.g www.secureserver.com) to the rest of the site. When I put the payment page on the secure server,and run through the transaction process, all the shopping cart info for that session is lost. I suspect it's because of the SS being a different URL. If so, is there any way around this so that I can pass info to pages on the SS?

thanks,

Rob

[balsdorf]

Is it actually a different server or just a different URL?
The different URL shouldn't mess it up. However, if it is a totally seperate server your session will be lost. However, there are several ways around this. One is to make the session files be stored on a shared drive that both servers can access. This is relatively simple and just requires changes to the PHP ini. This can lead to slower performance as reading from shared drives is not always the fastest operation.

Another (and probably better) option is to use session handlers that store the session data in the database. You can write them yourself or use some of the ones floating around on the internet. I actually believe there is an article (or 2) here on PHPbuilder about using database for sessions.

Good luck!

[mistcat]

and finally if the problem is that the sessioins aren't getting passed because the server is being dumb with the "auto append" session thing onto links you might just slap the session id on the end of any hypertext links to the secure site and preserve session that way. =)

• nate