[RESOLVED] IE9 and Session Cookies

gwerner

I've put together a fairly traditional login form. Everything work greats on a mac and pc in safari, chrome and firefox. Right now I'm testing it in IE 9 and from what I can tell the session variables are not being set. I haven't tested in IE 8 or IE 7 yet. I just got started with 9. I've checked the code and it is going all the way through the form validation and database check. I have it set up to redirect once it confirms the user exists.

Is there some obvious reason that I've not yet discovered? I've done the Google search thing and all I'm digging up is make sure you have the browser set to accept cookies. I do and still nothing. The only other thing I'v dug up is that I should make sure the domain matches as I move from page to page. That makes sense when setting a cookie, but I'm just using a session cookie. If I need to do this, how is this accomplished with a session variable.

Any help is appreciated. I can't even believe this is a problem I'm having. Everything was smooth up to IE.

Derokorian

Well to set the domain would be http://php.net/manual/en/function.session-set-cookie-params.php but it does seem very odd that it would work in the other browsers if that was the problem.

The one thing I've seen cause problems is "Compatibility Mode" which just makes IE less compatible with everything 😃 make sure this is off.

gwerner

Compatibility mode is off. When I turn that on it wrecks the site layout. So, I can't wait to start looking at the site in IE 7 and 8. Right now I just want to get this login figured out before getting buried in formatting issues.

Bonesnap

Just FYI, http://www.example.com is different than http://example.com, and will mess with sessions, so just make sure they're consistent across your site.

gwerner

That makes sense regarding domain consistency. Does that affect $_SESSION the same way it does when using set_cookie? I didn't think it did, but here I am on a forum asking for help. I'm using a combination of absolute and relative urls. Will that also make a difference? Everywhere I'm using absolute, I'm always using www. But when using a relative it might just be /dir/.

Thanks again.

dalecosp

bradgrafelman;11004670 wrote:
What if a user visits your site via "http://yoursite.com" rather than "http://www.yoursite.com" ? (The answer is, you'll have just forced them to start a new session.)

Sounds like a case for mod_rewrite.

As for IE9, and somewhat related. I didn't know until recently that you can render pages in the various IE$n compat modes using the IE F12 developer tools (which I generally hate, compared to Firebug or the native deuggers in Chrome and Opera), but it's occasionally handy to do this.

I'm not sure at all that running in a compatibility mode would fix the OP's issue, but I suppose it might be worth a try.

NogDog

<?php
session_set_cookie_params('3600', '/', '.domain.com'); // note leading '.' for domain
session_start();

gwerner

Everything that you all have said makes perfect sense. Most of that stuff I know, but I get easily confused when things stop working. Even if I go back and read the manual, I assume I still have it backwards.

Ultimately this is what was causing the issue. Apparently I misunderstood why, when and where to use this. I was calling this right before setting the session variables. I removed it and it works as it should.

session_regenerate_id(true);

Thanks again for the help and confirming some of the basics I already knew.