Question about session variables

jimdavidson

I have a two page form. I need info from page one to determine the layout of page two. I figure ok I'll use session variables. I built both pages, ran it on my localhost and all works fine.

I upload everything to the remote, try it, and page two doesn't respond to session variables. I have as the first line on both pages as session_start().

On page one when data is posted and saved to seeion variables I use the session_write_close() and then header to page two.

Why will session variables work on my localhost but not on the remote 'live' server?

Thanks

gardnc

One real quick possibility is that your browser is not accepting cookies from your "live" server. The PHP session ID needs to be save as a cookie.

NogDog

It might be something to do with the header() redirect. If there is a difference in the domain names used to access that page, then the session cookie may not be supplied for the redirected page. For instance, if you called the first page as http://yoursite.com/page1.php, but the redirect calls http://www.yoursite.com/page2.php, then the session cookie may not be passed, since semantically they are two different domains.

You can get around this by setting session.cookie_domain to ".yoursite.com" (note "." at beginning of the value, either in your PHP configuration file, a .htaccess file, or via the [man]session_set_cookie_params/man function, which you would need to use on each applicable page before the call to session_start().

Horizon88

Is there a reason you aren't using $_POST and bypassing cookies/sessions altogether?

jimdavidson

Thanks everyone, I'll give the cookies a try. Also I found that the 'live' remote server is running version 4.4.4 I'm going to request an update to version 5.

jimdavidson

Found (stumbled upon) the answer to my problem

For the header I had this...
header('Location: http://bobtracyinsurance.com/btracy_auto_quotes_2.php');

What I should have had was this...
header('Location: http://www.bobtracyinsurance.com/btracy_auto_quotes_2.php');

Three little w's made the difference, session variables now work.

bradgrafelman

jimdavidson wrote:
What I should have had was this...
header('Location: http://www.bobtracyinsurance.com/btracy_auto_quotes_2.php');

What if I had your site bookmarked without the www's? What if I was lazy and just typed in bobtracyinsurance.com ?

Unless you've got some mod_rewrite going on that forces a redirect to the 'www' subdomain, you never know.