IE 6 / XP / session challenge!

mdegalli

Hello!

I have a challenge. I've written a shopping system that has been working great for over a year -- but now has become unpredictible. The store works on Apache on Windows and Unix, PHP 4.0.1 through 4.2.2.

Example:

I upload a copy of a functioning store to a new web site and sessions 'sometimes' don't work.
I upload the store to a new sub-folder of the same site and the sessions work fine -- this trick only works sometimes.
All the stores work fine on IE5/Mac, IE5/Win98.
The stores work fine on IE6/WinXP with cookie security set to 'highest' but anything less it does not work.

I'm thinking there's a bug in IE on WinXP? Maybe PHP doesn't recognize cookies properly with this system?

Here's the code that is in question:

// in config.php for each page:
$SESSION["VDG_SESSION"]["previous_page"] = $SESSION["VDG_SESSION"]["current_page"];

$SESSION["VDG_SESSION"]["current_page"] = $SESSION["VDG_SESSION"]["homepath"].$HTTP_SERVER_VARS["REQUEST_URI"];

// in various other pages:
<a href="<? echo $_SESSION["VDG_SESSION"]["previous_page"]; ?>"><span class="Button2">  Continue Shopping  </span></a>

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
-Mark

KevinMG

the problem is with IE6. i remember reading about this when i was developing a login system. i don't remember exactly what the issue was, but it revolved around IE6's lack of session support (or proper session support anyway). i believe i ended up just using a cookie to get around it. hope that helps some. good luck!

mdegalli

Thanks for the reply!

I don't understand how a client browser could affect the server's variables/sessions. I tried turning off cookies with
ini_set("session.use_cookies","0") -- but no difference.

I don't want to redesign my whole system everytime Microsoft (or anyone else :-) comes out with a new browser.

If you can think of any other suggestions, I'd appreciate any new ideas.

Thanks again,
-Mark

KevinMG

I found this as a reply to a topic on php.net

I don't know wether this is a bug in IE6, but if a session has got no explicit name via session_id(String), IE6 won't register any variable with session_register()!

So if you're working with sessions and you'll be friendly to IE6-users, set manually a session-name.

i haven't tried it yet, but sounds like it may have the solution in it. let me know if it works or not.

here's the link to the page i found that on: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.session-id.php

mdegalli

Thanks, I saw that too -- still broken.

The strange thing is that some of my session variables work and some don't -- and identical scripts behave differently on different domains.

I'll have to dig in deeper and see what I'm doing wrong.

Thanks!
-Mark