KIll Session before they kill me

LiamBailey

HI folks,

Most of you will know my story, but here it is.

Users come to my site, and off the homepage, apart from the contact and about pages every other page is a html form.

From there they select a size, small medium or large from radio buttons, submit the form and are directed toa php form, on which I have stored the size they selected in their $_SESSION, i.e, on the php form I start:

<? session_start();
$_SESSION['size'] = $size;
?>

After they have filled out their info they are then taling to a payment page, which displays a different Paypl button depending on the size they selected on the first form, using if ($_SESSION['size'] = "small") { and so on.

But now, if my users decide to go back and pick a different size, when they get to the payment screen it still displays the payment buttong for the original size they selected.

Is there anyway to kill any existing sessions, start a new session and assign my variables, when they come onto the second form, and if no previous session exists then statrt a new one and assign my variables.

I've tried putting the following on the top of the second form;

<? if (isset($SESSION)) {session_destory(); session_start;
$SESSION['size'] = $size
}
else { session_start();
$_SESSION['size'] = $size
}
?>

I have also tried adding: session_regenerate_id in between session_destroy() and session_start() in the if argument.

NogDog

$SESSION does not get populated until you do session_start(). So if I understand you correctly (not a sure thing), all you want to do is get rid of all session values and start fresh, so you could just do:

<?php
session_start();
$_SESSION = array(); // initializes $_SESSION to an empty array
// now proceed with whatever you want to do...
$_SESSION['size'] = $size;

LiamBailey

Tried that stragght away Nogdog, my payment page is still remembering the first size I select on the first form, as that value is added to the session array on the second form. If i clear my cookies on the first form, then select a different size it works, but if I don't delete cookies, say I pick small, the payment page displays the small payment button, and if I go back and select medium or large, when i get to the payment page the button for small is still displayed.

bradgrafelman

Without seeing some code where you set the session variable... could it perhaps be a cache issue? Have you tried doing a hard refresh on the page that displays the image after changing sizes?

LiamBailey

Yes Brad, after deleting the cookies and doing a hard refresh new selections work, is there anyway I can make php cause the page to do a hard refresh each time it loads?

bradgrafelman

By hard refresh, I didn't mean deleting cookies, I just meant forcing your browser to reload the page (usually ctrl+F5 or shift+F5, I forget which).

You could also try outputting some HTTP headers to discourage browsers from caching the page (ex. "Pragma: no-cache", "Expires: <date far in the past>", etc.).

kterry

AOL users will still have the problem though. Nothing gets past their caching servers. We've tried everything and then some at work.

bradgrafelman

If it's truly that critical, you could prevent the page from being cached by adding a random value to the URL, e.g. "/myscript.php?rand=2313518". That way, even caching systems won't cache the page since it appears to be a different page, even though your script doesn't do anything with the 'rand' value in the URL.