PHP Sessions again !

Nick_Whymark

Hi,

I have a paid account with lycos and am having enormous trouble with sessions in PHP. I use IE5 & IE6 and get the problem with both.

They seem to work fine for a bit and then (presumably when the session times out), they stop working !

I could be wrong, but I get the impression that the session file is expiring before the cookie so that there still appears to be a session (session_id() still contains a value, but the variables have disappeared).

Any attempt to destroy the session or delete the cookie make no difference. Eventually the session will work ok again (I'm guessing that this is when the session cookie times out).

I'm in the process of writing my own session handling functions, but I'd much rather use the built in ones.

I'm trying to install and modify PHP classifieds, but this is causing a big problem.

Does anyone else have any experience of sessions and lycos ? I'm convinced it's either a PHP problem or something to do with lycos' set up as I've tried everything I can think of or find.

I also noticed that the time on my server is an hour in the future - not sure if this would have any affect. I also notice that the session lifetime is different to the cookie lifetime (session.cookie_lifetime
=3600, session.gc_maxlifetime=1200). I tried changing them to match in code, but still doesn't seem to work.

I have no access to the ini parameters for PHP as lycos set them up unfortunately.

Aaaaaaaaargh !

Any help greatly appreciated !
Nick.

sijis

i think you are confusing the role of sessions and cookies.
(at least this is my presumption of their common use)

sessions hold values for a limited amount of time as long as the user is 'active'. the session will end, by itself, once the user become 'inactive'. I believe the time is 30 minutes or so.

cookies hold values for a much longer period of time (if specified when creating the cookie). You can retrieve a cookie's value a week/month/year later.

In theory, the session will probably expire before the cookie.
what you could do is save the same information in a cookie and in a session.

$name = "Bob";
setcookie();
$_SESSION['s_username'] = $name
setcookie("c_username",$name,time()+3600); / expire in 1 hour /

there are also examples on how to check if sessions is registered, set. etc... here:
http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.session.php

hope this helps.

Nick_Whymark

sijis,

Thanks for the reply ! Here's what I think sessions do - I'm happy for you or anyone to correct me, because I may well be getting lost.

When you do a session_start() it create a new unique id and then, depending on the PHP settings and the users browser settings, either a cookie is created containing the session id (in other words sessions can use cookies) or the session id is appended to the url.

When you do a session_register('variable') or $_SESSION['variable'] = "xxx" (assuming you have session.save_handler set to 'files') a file is created using the session id which contains the name and value of the variable.

When you access a session variable it comes from the file. When you access the session id (using session_id() or $PHPSESSID) it comes from the cookie or url.

I seem to have the situation where the original session id still exists (i.e the cookie is still there - I can look at it), but the variables have vanished.

My ISP has session.cookie_lifetime set to 3600 (1 hour) and session.gc_maxlifetime set to 1200 (20 minutes). Would this mean that my session file (with the variables) is deleted after 20 minutes yet the cookie remains valid for another 40 ? Should these parameters be the same ?

Sorry if I'm being stupid !

Nick.