[RESOLVED] Sessions Variables Not Passing (sort of)

Timsoft

I am working with a multipage form in which I want to carry along some variables in a session and use them to concatenate values to create some logic. The problem is, when I call them, I receive a "Notice: Undefined index: city" where city is the name of the variable I am calling.

The reason the post says (Sort of) is that the previous page actually uses this session variable to redirect!

Things I have done -
1. session_start (); on every page using these variables.
2. Validated my form (Also verified items are being past as post variables)
3.Tons of syntax changes
4. Google - a couple people had this problem, but it was either miraculously fixed, or no solution was provided at all...

Page 1: stores the city in a session variable.

<?php

//Invoke session to hold variables
session_start();

//Stores city value in a session variable from form so that it may be concatenated to text selections later on
$_SESSION['city'] = $_POST['city'];





//take value of city selected and redirect so that user may make selections within the selected city
switch($_SESSION['city'])
{
  case 'Atlanta':  header("Location: http://www.example.com/membertext/atlanta.php");
  break;

  case 'Birmingham':   header("Location: http://www.example.com/membertext/birmingham.html");
  break;

  default: echo "Sorry, you must select a city";
}

 ?>

I use the $SESSION['city'] variable to determine the redirect, and that works fine. Howeverm once I arrive at the redirect, I try to call $SESSION['city'] again, and it fails...

Page 2

<?php session_start();  ?>

<!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 http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>Untitled Document</title>
</head>



<body>

   <?php if(isset($_SESSION['city'])) {echo $_SESSION['city'];} else {echo "Sorry";} ?>......
 truncated the rest of this....

Has this happened to anyone else..?

CoderDan

the most common reason for sessions disappearing is when there is some sort of output before session_start is called, in your example code you pasted this does not appear to be the case, however. Nor is session_start being called twice, and I'm assuming you are neither destroying the session anywhere nor emptying it.
Is the domain the same for both pages? Long shot, but possibility. Are cookies disabled?

edit: also, you mention a redirect - is it possible that the redirect covers a page that doesn't call session_start, as it needs to be called every time.

Timsoft

Thanks for the reply Dan. I just went back double checked your suggestions.

The redirect page is within the same domain. I started every page with session_start();

Also, I haven't used any session erasing mechanism yet.

Any other ideas on how I can troubleshoot this?

Thanks,

Tim

CoderDan

well, i guess next step in troubleshooting would be to start every page with (right after the session start) echo"\n"; and start viewing source of each page as you go along to figure out exactly where you lose the session data

dagon

are you passing the session id in a cookie or url? if url you need to add it to your header location. if cookies you can use ff tools>options>show cookies to check it.

Timsoft

Thank you guys for your effort. I was able to fix it. For other people who have similar problems, the solution was to add

session_write_close(); - Before the redirect. and - exit(); afterward

The reason the session variables were getting lost is the - header("Location: ....