AJAX receiving empty PHP sessions (I'm stumped!)

[stasia]

I've been ripping my hair out every day for almost a week trying to figure this bug out and would be forever grateful if a more experienced developer could help me out. I've recently switched web hosts and everything was working fine up until now, the problem could be that my old host was using PHP4 and the new host is using PHP5 but I can't be entirely sure as my old host uses 4 & 5 so I'm not sure which one my server was using then but l let us proceed..

Basically I have a login script which stores the user'd ID upon login, a header.php file (for any page requiring a header/layout) which also includes a globals.php file with session start that is included on every single js/php file that could possibly ever need to use a session (trust me I've checked every one). I then have two bugged ajax scripts that are both emptying the session ID (or not receiving it?) and log me out as soon as I navigate away from the page. I have an ajax chat that loads everything up fine (including previous chat messages that were working properly), but if I try to make a chat post it shows as being from user id #0 and as soon as I leave the chat I'm logged out. I also have an ajax form that reloads a div on submit which also works properly but does not receive a user ID and also logs me out as soon as I navigate away from the page. The user ID will be show properly in the heading, up until the ajax is loaded and then it gets emptied.

Any ideas what could be wrong? I'm pretty much completely stumped and my web hosting support couldn't help out either. Only thing I can think of is switching web hosts and seeing if its a server problem on the one I'm using now but its such a pain that I'd really like to avoid it at all costs but there's really no work around for using sessions. Thank you in advance to any and all advice, if you'd like to see code let me know but at this point I'm not sure what code to display.

[dagon]

need to see some code.

[stasia]

Hi, thanks for the reply.

I actually have way to much code to put up here and I'm not sure where the problem is so I'm not sure what to post. I've been working on this project for around 2 years now so I have mass amounts of coding entangled, sorry. I had this portion working correctly but one day it magically started bugging out by itself so I'm back trying to remember where everything is at.

I've continued trying to debug by myself, I noticed that having session_start in my reloading ajax page was causing it to rewrite the session with value 0 (only took me half of the day to figure that much out -.-) but now the session isn't being passed to the reloading page altogether. I have the reloading ajax page included into the parent page which acquires the session ID properly via session start but its not being passed to the ajax page when refreshed and if any file with session_start is included into the reloading file it will replace the session ID with 0. Any ideas how I can get a session sent to this file without using session_start? Thankfully its not terminating the session altogether anymore. 🙂

[johanafm]

Where you put session_start() should not matter, as long as it comes before any attempts to use $_SESSION and before any output.
However, if the problem arose when you switched web hosts, I suspect that the problem might be a different php.ini setup, in particular one of the following
- register_globals has changed
- variables_order has changed

How do you access your session variables? If a session variable is called var, do you access it with $var, $_SESSION['var'] or session_register()?

[stasia]

I access it with $_SESSION['var'];

Here's a simple ajax chat I'm testing on the site which isn't receiving the session. Seems all pages called by ajax can't echo the session id.

chatroom.php

<?php
session_start();

include "header.php";

$sid = $_SESSION['sid'];
?>

<script src="chatroom.js"></script>

<p><textarea id="post"></textarea>

<input type="button" value="Send" onclick="sendMessage();"></p>

<div id="chatMessages"></div>

<script>
window.setInterval("refreshChat()",10000);
</script>

<body onload="refreshChat()">

and here is the chatpost.php file that inputs the chat message & user id (session id) into the db

<?php
session_start();

$date=time();

$q="INSERT INTO chatroom (posterid, post, timeposted) VALUES ('$sid', '$_POST[message]', '$date')";

mysql_query($q);
?>

Funny thing is, while just playing around with it right now I noticed that if all of the files are on the same home directory the session id gets sent. If I try to send the session from a file in the home directory to a file in another folder the session gets emptied. Any ideas why this is occurring? I'd very much like to keep my files organized as they are. xD

[johanafm]

stasia;10983500 wrote:

session_start();

$date=time();

$q="INSERT INTO chatroom (posterid, post, timeposted) VALUES ('$sid'");
?>[/code]
[/code]

PHP parser wrote:

Notice: Undefined variable: sid in ...

You do log errors, don't you?

Which seems to imply that the previous PHP install registered session variables (bad), while this one doesn't (good).