Foxfire and IE6 loosing session. IE7 works as expected.

HeidiR

Hello All,

I have run into an issue where Foxfire and IE6 are loosing session information. However, running the same php program in IE7 works as expected. Test code is below. What am I missing???

session_start();

print_r($_POST);
print_r($_SESSION);

$str = "<form method=post action=" . $PHP_SELF . ">";
$str .= "<input name=name type=text>";
$str .= "<input name=cmd type=submit value=Send>";
$str .= "</form>";
echo($str);

$_SESSION['name'] = $_POST['name'];

IE6 and Fox Results:
Array ( [name] => aaa [cmd] => Send )
Array ( )

IE7 Results:
Array ( [name] => aaa [cmd] => Send )
Array ( [name] => xxx )

dagon

after post AND refresh it should be ok, as your not putting the posted data in the session till after your print_r

dagon

I got the same results testing on ff(3.03) and ie7, i suggest you hadn't cleared the sessions before the test.

HeidiR

dagon;10892037 wrote:
I got the same results testing on ff(3.03) and ie7, i suggest you hadn't cleared the sessions before the test.

Thanks for the quick reply! I started frest browser sessions on three different machines. One machine using Foxfire, One machine using IE6 and one machine using IE7. All machines are running Windows XP. As mentioned previously, IE7 works correctly. However, Foxfire and IE6 do not maintain a session runnig the same php code, which ran on the IE7 machine.

I have Googled around and found other reports of the same issue. However, I have not found a solution to the session issue.

My current workaround is to post a hidden variable to save-off the value I would normaly save in a session variable. However, I would like to get to the root of the issue for fiture reference.

Weedpacket

Two or three things to check:

Your PHP configuration: your session settings, particularly session.use_cookies and session.use_trans_sid
Cookie settings, both in general and for your specific domain (I know you can whitelist/blacklist particular domains in Firefox; I don't remember about IE6); for that matter I don't know if IE7 and IE6 will conflict over browser settings (I always run them in different virtual machines)

If use_trans_sid is off and the browser is refusing cookies then you would have to fall back on inserting the session ID into the URL manually.

HeidiR

Weedpacket;10892143 wrote:
Two or three things to check:

Your PHP configuration: your session settings, particularly session.use_cookies and session.use_trans_sid
Cookie settings, both in general and for your specific domain (I know you can whitelist/blacklist particular domains in Firefox; I don't remember about IE6); for that matter I don't know if IE7 and IE6 will conflict over browser settings (I always run them in different virtual machines)
If use_trans_sid is off and the browser is refusing cookies then you would have to fall back on inserting the session ID into the URL manually.

Thanks for the info. I checked my php config for sessions, as you suggested, and found the followiing settings:

session.use_cookies On
session.use_only_cookies Off
session.use_trans_sid Off

I tried setting session.use_trans_sid to on using the following code before session_start():

ini_set(’session.use_trans_sid’,1) 
session_start()

However, after running the code again, I received the same results on Firefox and IE6 (no session var). IE7 worked fine.

HeidiR

Hello All,

After some additional research and testing, I found the following two causes of the issue:

1) Firefox and IE6 were not accepting cookies
2) ini_set(’session.use_trans_sid’, 1) can not be set by php to enable sessions to work without cookies.

The solution I implemented was to test if cookies are enabled using the code below. However, this will only let you know if cookies are enabled or not. Any logic dependent on session vars with cookies NOT enabled will fail.

setcookie ('cookies_enabled', '1', time() + 60);
if ($_COOKIE['cookies_enabled'])
	echo('Cookies enabled');
else
	echo('Cookies are NOT enabled');

dagon

you can't test on the same page you set, as they are headers. You have to set on one page and test on another.

HeidiR

dagon;10893138 wrote:
you can't test on the same page you set, as they are headers. You have to set on one page and test on another.

Dagon, Thanks for the info. My app is a multi-pass form. I am currently checking cookies as the page is initially loaded (1st pass). If the user tries to preform any operation without cookies (after 1st pass), an error is displayed.

HeidiR