keeping users logged in

[jpmoriarty]

Many apologies for starting a thread again which has no doubt come up in the past - i tried searching for it but couldnt come up with a search string that seemed to give me the answer i wanted! If the answer lies somewhere else then please feel free to post links to those threads...

I'm designing an intranet site and want people to be able to log into it - the login process will be a simple select a name from a list (no passwords or anything). I want the system to then remember what name was selected until the user goes back to the login page and changes it - ie, it should remember the user ad infinitum, after closing the browser, for the rest of the day, rest of the year etc.

I figured that the best way would be to use a cookie since i didnt think that it would need sessions - but I may be way off the mark with that.

I've got my login script to create a cookie (at least i thought i had), and it showed up my user name as expected - but oddly when i searched my system for the cookie i couldnt find it. Also, when i went to a directory above the one where i'd set the cookie, it didnt remember the value of the cookie. I presume I'm setting it wrong (I was just using setcookie("user", "My Name")) and for some reason it's not actually saving it on the computer.

ANy advice or links? Many thanks in advance.

[xblue]

if you don't set the expiration time, the cookie times out as soon as the browser is closed, and it is never written to the hard disk.

so, you'd probably want to set the expiration time like
time()[phone] // one year in seconds
and probably also set the path, e.g. to '/' so that the cookie will be available within the entire domain.
setcookie("user", "My Name", time()[phone], '/');

hope this helps,
xblue

[jpmoriarty]

ah that's got it - many thanks