sessions

[assonitis]

Dear friends,

I am bulding an online bookstore and i want to have to options
1. continue without login
2. login

logged in users get different data than the users who don't login.

so for the not logged in users i use a
start_session()

and for the logged in
if (login($username, $passwd))
session_register("$username")

to all my pages at the beginning i have
start_session()

will this work or the session for the logged in users will be destroyed when the change to another page?

do I have to check i every page if the session is registered in order for them to get the different data? that is....

for the not logged in
if session_register("")
....do that

and for the logged in
if session_register("$username")
.....do that?

will this work properly?

many thanks
Notis

[Anon]

I'd just keep a session variable that says whether they're logged in or not logged in (plus other session variables as needed, but they don't play a role in this).

Initially (on the home page) it's set to "not logged in", then if and when they decide to log in, it's updated to "logged in".

On each page, you just need to check the value of this variable to decide what information to display.

You could have a wee login form on every page so's users can log in any time they want. Using $HTTP_REFERER or a hidden form field in the login form to identify which page was being displayed at the time, the login script could check them off against the database; set the login session variable to "logged in" if it's a valid login, then redirect the browser back to the page the login was made from.

From the user's point of view, an invalid login would have no effect beyond a page refresh, while a successful login would refresh the page with the new information.

[Anon]

One addition I'd make to that description.

If the "is logged in" session variable isn't set at all, it should be set to "not logged in".

session_start();
session_register('isloggedin');
if(!isset($isloggedin) || empty($isloggedin)) // Just covering myself here
$isloggedin='not logged in';

if($isloggedin=='is logged in')
{ They're logged in
}
else
{ They're not.
}