run it only once?

deep

Hello!

I have a php script that only can be run once. And im not sure how to do that. I was first thinking I use include_once() but that wouldnt look good because i woule have to have several files... Then I was thinking... if i can track the users IP I can make sure that the same user can't use the same script more then once. How do I track IP's and is there maybe a better way to do this?

Thanks!

AstroTeg

Depending on what the script does, I just have it check if its already did the work it was asked to do. But you didn't provide any details to know if this would even make sense to your problem.

You can track IP, but the favorite argument is, "what do you do when you have multiple people from a large entity (be it an ISP or corporation) which all share 1 IP?"

At this point, you have to start looking into sessions or ideally building your own session manager.

deep

the script will count how many leads or sales have been made. When a paying user comes to the last page "thank you page" my code will count one sale or one lead. The thing is, if the user clicks on the refresh button there will be 2 leads or sales instead of one and thats not good.

Your right about IP, its probably not the best way...

So I mixed this code together using sessions but its not working yet 🙂 maybe you can help?

if(!isset($_SESSION['check_lead_sale']))	{
   //my code that counts the lead or sale
}
$_SESSION['check_lead_sale'] = 1; //any value

Thats not working?

drew010

i think it is safe to use ip addresses for this.
the reason is, because all large companies subnet addresses and assign ip's to all machines either statically or thru something like dhcp. the maximum number of computers than can be shared on an ip thru NAT is about 255 (1 address is assigned to the router and the others go to individual cpus). and the number would go down for each additional switch or router attatched to the main gateway.
i use ip logging for the same reasons and it seems to work fine for me.

deep

LOL, i forgot session_start();

It works now, thanks!

freebie

just thought I'd add a comment on something I'd heard in the past. I've heard that AOL assigns a new IP address to a user on each new page access. Does anyone know if there's any truth to this?

ShawnK

AOL sucks...really! They could do that...but it'd be slow as heck. I dunno, I use charter not AOL.