SessionID being appended to URLS in INCLUDE file

liamcody

I'm having a problem and I'm wondering if you can help. Here's the deal.

My site uses a template to create pages. There is a database that contains details on pages -- sectionName, URL, pageID, pageHTML (i.e. the content) and some other stuff (eg: imageURL).

What I want to do is set up some dynamic content caching.

The plan is this:

The Error404 page will:

Search for the requested page in the database, and if there is an exact match, display the file "publish-template.php?pageID=XX", where XX is the pageID of the record.
Save that generated HTML as a file in the filesystem. This means that subsequent users will not get the error.

Once that's working, I'll be able to add a feature that deletes pages when user submissions are added to them, and not have to do the manual publishing that I currently do.

I'm almost there. I can generate and save the file, but now I've got a weird problem.

It seems that, because I am adding a querystring value, my include() statement has to be an [url]http://[/url] include. This means the syntax is include("http://www.mydomain.com/publish-template.php?pageID=XX");
(I've tried other schemes, and this is the only one that works).

It generates the page OK, but seems to append ?SESSSIONID=XX onto the end of all of the URLS I am outputting as links (for the navigation).

Any clues on how I can stop this?

Thanks

Liam Cody

tsinka

Hi,

I think this is because session.auto_start is on in the php.ini file.
If you don't have access to the ini file you might be able to change this by putting a .htaccess to your DOCUMENT_ROOT to switch off the session.auto_start.
But be aware that you might run in troubles if you use session because you need to add the session ID manually if you switch off session.auto_start.
If you need sessions you should leave session.auto_start enabled. Does it cause any problems that the session ID is added to the URL's ?

Thomas

tsinka

Hi,

I accidently mentioned the wrong parameter. It is session.use_trans_sid not session.auto_start.

Sorry.

liamcody

It doesn't cause any major problems that the sessionID is added to the URLs.

EXCEPT

I am concerned that it may 'corrupt' my web usage stats. If a file is saved with hard-coded sessionID, won't that be recorded in the web logs? In which case, it would reduce the nubmer of unique user sessions.

I've been told to investigate using an eval() on the file, rather than an include(). Not sure how well that would work, but will try it for version 1.1.

tsinka

Hi,

you should stripp off the get part from the filename before saving it. That is mandatory to prevent subsequent users to use the same session id which would be a security flaw. Doing so shouldn't corrupt your stats.

liamcody

How do I do that? What is the function, and where do I execute it?

At the moment, my code is:

$fileToOutput = "filename.html";
$myString = "publish-template-1.php?pageID=XX";
ob_start();
ob_implicit_flush(0);
// Output stuff here...
include($myString);
$contents = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();
$fp=fopen($fileToOutput,"w");
fwrite($fp, $contents);
fclose($fp);
$fileToOutput = "filename.html";

Thanks

Liam