Sessions and forms

karie

Hello, I've just started learning PHP, please forgive any stupid mistakes. I've encountered a problem trying to use form post data and session variables together. When I attempt process data from a form in a form using session variables and carry on the session in another page, the page I carry the session over to loads extremely slowly. When I don't use a form, to submit data, everything loads quickly. I'm not sure if this has to do with my server or my code. It's driving me nuts trying to figure out why. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance. 🙂

// ------------------HTML with form (login.html)------------------
<html>
<head>
<title>Sign In</title>
</head>

<body>

<form action="login.php" method="POST">
<table>
<tr>
<td>Username
</td>
<td><input type="text" name="username" id="username" size="25">
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Password
</td>
<td><input type="password" name="password" id="password" size="25">
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="2"><input type="submit" name="submit" value="Submit"></td>
</tr>
</table>
</form>

</body>
</html>

// ------------------First PHP Session Page (login.php)------------------
<?php
session_start();
echo "Starting session " . session_id() . ".<br>\n";

session_register('username');
$SESSION['name'] = $POST['username'];
echo "<p>Welcome, ". $_SESSION['name'] . "</p>\n";
echo "<a href='logout.php'>Logout</a><br>\n";
?>

// ------------------First PHP Session Page (login.php)------------------
<?php
session_start();
setcookie(session_name(),"");
echo "Goodbye, " . $_SESSION['name']. "<br>\n";
echo "Ending session ". session_id() . ".<br>\n";
?>

scoppc

session_register('username'); 
$_SESSION['name'] = $_POST['username'];

I am not sure on what exactly makes it slow... anyway, I spot what I think is not appropriate.
When you register a name for the session, username, you should use it in $SESSION[] too.
Thus, it should not be $SESSION['name'] but $_SESSION['username'], instead.

to destroy a SESSION use something like this:

	//start the session and in the end, destroy it!
	session_start();
	header("Cache-control: private"); 
	session_register("username");
	session_unregister("username");
	session_unset();
	session_destroy();

I have just started to use SESSION few days ago, forgive me if I'm wrong 😃 😃

karie

Thanks for replying, scoppc. I still can't figure out what makes the code so slow. Perhaps, it is just the server. The username and name was a typo, I was switching between the names and forgot to change name to username. Thanks for informing me about the error. I'm not sure that when you use session_destroy() you need to unset the session variables also, since I read that session_destroy(), it destroys the session variables. Hopefully I can figure out why my code runs slowly.