using sessions

jpmoriarty

much as i love my php book, it's a little vague about sessions.

I'm deisigning a sort-of-booking system, and i want to keep track on a user as they go from page to page. I dont want to have a login system or anything (not needed).

How do i set up sessions so that i can keep track on the same user throughout, so that when the "enquire" on some seats and then wants to confirm those seats, i can be sure it's the same person? My book just wants to move onto cookies, and i've no real need for that at the moment. It says something about =SID, but i dont get anything out when i use that.

Thanks in advance

kristianblom

First of all read about session in the articles on this site. This area is to large to explain in this reply. But here is the link...

http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/index.php3?cat=6&subcat=36

Sessions will definetely do it for you

jpmoriarty

thanks for that, but i didnt quite get what i'm after.

My book says that "sessions are driven by a unique session ID, a cryptographically random number". It's this that i want to get to -the articles i read talk about using sessions to store a user ID, or a password or whatever, but i dont have any of that. All i want to do is to be able to tell my script that the person who enquired on some seats on the last page is now confirming that order. I dont want to have to "make up" a user id for him, since that's what the session ID should be in the first place!

All i want to be able to do is to tell that it's the same person browsing from page to page, nothing more (no storing of extra info etc). Am i getting confused over nothing here, and missing something blindingly obvious?

kristianblom

OK...
A session is unique for every user and you can access the session id by $_SESSION['PHPSESSID'] ...

jpmoriarty

okay thanks - i'm getting there now! One last thing though...

i cant use it in functions (it's giving me a variable undefined error): I've tried declaring it as global but that seems to have no effect (you would correctly assume that i'm quite new to functions in php!). Surely i dont have to pass it to each fucntion that i call?

kristianblom

hmm... i thought you could do like this...

function some(){
global $var;
...
..
.
}