Session problem..PayPal?

thefisherman

Hi!

If a customer is being redirected to PayPal, pays and comes back, is there any chance of losing the session?

What would be the way to redirect a customer to PayPal, and then come back to the site still having the same session_id?

Right now, i have a table with cart-items and a session_id in it.

Works fine, 'til the customer comes back from PayPal.

I'd appreciate some guidelines in this, since it is the ver last part of the development!

The whole session thing works fine, so that's not it, things go wrong when customers come back from PayPal.

thefisherman

Forgot to mention:

When i try this myself on my local network, the session apparently stays alive and all customer data is alive as well!

I send a mail to myself when an order is made and when i myself do it, all data shows up in the mail (customer name, order nr. etc..) but when someone else tries this (externally), i get an almost empty email.

thefisherman

batman

How are going about this? Are you just passing the info to paypal and then having them login to their account once there? If this is the case you may want to tell the customers not to logg-off until afterwards....reason being, I dont know how paypal works, but if they set sessions after the login then they most likely do a session_destroy(); on the log-off page which will delete your sessions.

Taking that into consideration, do another test order and dont log off before you finish.

thefisherman

Thnx, you've got a point, though i just discovered this:

Customer comes back from PayPal; session_id is different than what it used to be.

Refresh the page, session_id keeps changing.

This is a page that says: 'Thanks for ordering', with a button that goes to download page.

On the download page, i check session_id and it matches the id in my table!

This is weird, the session_id changes, then reverts back to the original session_id, which, in the table keeps track of all the data.

And the email thing i talked about, happens before this download page, with the wrong session_id, so the email's empty!

thefisherman

batman

It sounds like it's trying to get set twice giving it two values. So again, I don't know how paypal runs the login scripts, but they could also have a session that gets set as session_id (common session name). So....if I were you I would try to change this name to something else, possibly shorten it to sess_id, or whatever and see if that works for you.