[RESOLVED] SESSION Vars are gone

GrexP

What could I have done to cause all $_SESSION[] vars to be empty?

I've been working on this project for a few weeks. It is made up of 5 pages and 2 session vars. Everything has been working fine until about 2 hours ago. The Session variables are empty after the first page.

Here is the first one which is set on the first page. $ClinicID is now only good on the first page. I'm still testing so I set it here and it never changes on any other pages.

<?php 
session_start();	
$_SESSION['ClinicID'];	
$ClinicID="My Clinic";
?>

On the second page I have

<?php
session_start();
$_SESSION['PatID'];
?>

Just to see what is going on I have....

print ("<p>ClinicID = {$ClinicID}</p>");

As the very first line on the second page. $ClinicID is empty. This morning everything was working fine. Now nothing. I restarted everything and still it does not work.

$PatID has the same problem. I set it and it is only good on that page.

What did I do?

bradgrafelman

Two problems:

You never assign a value to $SESSION['ClinicID'] or $SESSION['PatID'] on the first page.
You never define $ClinicID on the second page.

Also, lines like this:

$_SESSION['ClinicID'];

or this:

$_SESSION['PatID'];

don't do anything at all. What were you expecting them to do?

Here's a very basic example of how sessions work:

file1.php

<?php
session_start();
$_SESSION['foo'] = 'bar';
?>

file2.php

<?php
session_start();
echo "Test: " . $_SESSION['foo']; // Test: bar
?>

GrexP

Well this is very strange because everything worked despite my doing it completely wrong. I come from a programming background that is not nearly as forgiving as PHP. In my world everything must be declared first and then assigned a value.

I thought that this "$_SESSION['ClinicID'];" declared the ClinicID variable then $ClinicID="My Clinic" assigned it a value. If those lines do nothing then why was $ClinicID available on other pages with a value of "My Clinic"?

Something is not right here. I'm not sure what I did but I went back and looked at a few tutorials I've been looking at. One of them shows this...

session_register ("new_variable");
$new_variable = "whatever";

At some point I must have replaced "session_register ("ClinicID");" with $_SESSION['ClinicID']. Because I created these session vars weeks ago and haven't changed anything having to do with session vars. I must have chagned it but didn't realize what I was looking at after it stopped working.

Very frustrating but thanks. It works now - AGAIN!

Greg