[RESOLVED] redirects

paulnf

ok i made a major mistake when building my website and now i am having to clean it all up. one problem i seem to not be able to shake is the header() issue.

I am trying to do a redirect back to the index page if the user fails to login. I have all of the html code below my php code but I still get the error. if anyone can offer me some advice or direction on this i would be truly greatful. there are parts of the page i am not permitted to post and have removed that. so please understand I have placed the primary piece of code that is giving me the headache.

<?PHP
session_start();

if(isset($_SESSION['user_id'])) {
                           <query the database or something>
	} else {
	echo "you have failed to login";
	// User not logged in
	header('location: http://'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].dirname($_SERVER['PHP_SELF']).'index.php');
	exit();
	}
?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type" />

paulnf

ok i figured it out. if anyone else runs into a problem like this i hope it helps.
in my original code i did the following.

<?PHP 
session_start(); 
<set variables>
<connected to database>
    if(isset($_SESSION['user_id'])) { 
                               <query the database or something> 
        } else { 
        echo "you have failed to login"; 
        // User not logged in 
        header('location: http://'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].dirname($_SERVER['PHP_SELF']).'index.php'); 
        exit(); 
        } 
?>

then it hit me that why would i establish a connection to the database before i validate that the user has logged in. i moved that information into the if statement and wala everything worked.

<?PHP 
session_start(); 
    if(isset($_SESSION['user_id'])) { 
                               <set variables>
                               <connected to database>
                               <query the database or something> 
        } else { 
        echo "you have failed to login"; 
        // User not logged in 
        header('location: http://'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].dirname($_SERVER['PHP_SELF']).'index.php'); 
        exit(); 
        } 
?>