Still cookies!

thefisherman

Hi!

I've written a site where sessions are used to track which are doing what.

Basically it works fine. So yesterday i bought a new laptop, hooked it up on the internet and tried the site.

Added something to the shoppingcart, viewed my shoppingcart later, and found out it was empty.

Turns out that freshly installed IE on the laptop was blocking php scripts because it thought it was cookie-related!

Changed the privacy settings to accept all cookies and now it works!

Does anyone have any idea how i am using cookies, while i never programmed anything with cookies? (just sessions, that's it)

Thanks in advance!

thefisherman

p.s. PHP automatically added the SID to the links, maybe i should add it myself in the links?, because i heard once that PHP tries to add session id's to links when none is given. Maybe it also tries to do the same thing with cookies?

bad76

Hi,
By default the session use cookies. Try to look in phpinfo() command for session properties.

To avoid this set session.use_cookies=off in your php.ini.

thefisherman

Hi!

Well, i looked up session.use_cookies and set it to off, then i tried to add something to the cart and went back to the search page. Then, clicked on view cart and the items were gone, even with privacy settings set to 'Accept all cookies'

Any idea?

thefisherman

drawmack

from the php manual

session.use_cookies boolean

session.use_cookies specifies whether the module will use cookies to store the session id on the client side. Defaults to 1 (enabled).

If you're not storing a cookie on the user's machine that tells you who they are then where are you storing it. My guess would be that this actually turns sessions off.

If you really don't want it to be tied to cookies you can do it like this.

1) Require the person to log in befor placing items in their cart
2) Store the cart items in the database linked to that user's record.

Now if you want to allow persistent log ons you're right back to cookies.

The only way to relate information with a specific visitor is to use cookies or pass a variable around with every link and method 2 forces a log on everytime the person visits your page.

thefisherman

You got a point there. Seems logical too.

I guess if sessions need cookies to store information in, i will stick with that.

It means though that users need to accept all cookies in order for it to work, that's a bit of a gamble.

On the other hand, forcing everyone to login when they enter the site is not an option i think.

Thanks a lot for your time and patience!

thefisherman

drawmack

Actually as long as they are set up to accept first party cookies (not available in all browsers but one of the reasons opera should be the only browser) that will work as well.

We can always put a notice about this on your site and allow the user to choose persistent or non-persistent log ins.