[RESOLVED] responsive site / home screen icon / cookies

jeepin81

Hello All... it's been awhile.

I don't have any code to show but just need help figuring out a thought.

We have built a responsive website that requires a login via PHP and uses $SESSION, $COOKIE, etc... We want to encourage people to add our icon to their home screen of their mobile device & use that icon to access the responsive page.

To prevent them from having to consistently log back in I have been dropping a unique $_COOKIE:

setcookie($cookieName, $tokenValue, time()+(86400 * 30), "/");

This works fine on Android and Chrome browsers but I seem to be running into an issue w/ iOS Safari. From what I have read iOS is now treating native / web based icons w/ different storage locations. When an iOS Safari user attempts to re-enter the site I am no longer able to retrieve that $_COOKIE and they're prompted to re-authenticate.

Has anyone ran into this issue and have a nice solution? I was thinking about adding another token the the URL and including that into the home screen icon but I wasn't sure if there was a better method.

I appreciate any insight.

jeepin81

adding login token to iOS devices URL during home screen icon download. thanks for the suggestions.:rolleyes:

dalecosp

Welcome back ... things have slowed down a bit. Not sure if anyone had no thoughts, or if no one had gotten 'round to looking yet. I know this is the first I've seen of your thread.

Glad you got it working. So, to elaborate a bit ... the icon name on iOS includes a token to help recognize the end-user?

jeepin81

I was just joking with that icon... :p What I've read is that iOS devices treat web based apps & local apps w/ two different sandboxes for storage. I was dropping a cookie on the device via Safari and that cookie went to Safari's sandbox(web based). However, when a user saved our icon to their home screen and they clicked that icon to open the web based app. it wasn't recognizing the cookie in the Safari sandbox b/c I believe it's treating those home screen icons as local apps but I am not 100%.

What I changed and I don't know if this a good/bad/awful solution.. When the user downloads the home screen icon I add the same value of the cookie to the home screen icons launch URL and grab it from there since it doesn't recognize the cookie in the Safari sandbox.

Android, Chrome and other mobile browsers all seem to work fine w/ the cookie.

I apologize if that is confusing. I've been searching for a better solution but I'm not having any luck. Also, once I have extra time I'll run this web based "app" through PhoneGap which should solve all issues.

On topic question added to echo lounge.

I appreciate the reply!

dersport

Nice write up

dalecosp

jeepin81;11044339 wrote:
What I changed and I don't know if this a good/bad/awful solution.. When the user downloads the home screen icon I add the same value of the cookie to the home screen icons launch URL and grab it from there since it doesn't recognize the cookie in the Safari sandbox.

I appreciate the reply!

I certainly understand the needs for hacks ;-)

I kind of think it's universal, to some extent, although we all wish it wasn't so. This was in the morning's mailbox, and it heartened me a bit to know that, on occasion, there are other "lost souls" in their IDE's someplace...

jeepin81

Safety Pig! 😃

So, I thought I was okay with my hack and adding the token to the URL...... turns out, when you save a home screen icon on a iOS device it strips all parameters from the URL. So, no cookie and no custom URL with an additional parameter to remember the user. Hmmmm now what?

Do I dynamically create a directory w/ the token as the directory name and use that as my URL w/o extra parameters?

something like:

www.abcsite.com/users/token-st45kT6o032mt/index.php

Seems a little odd as a way to remember a user.

I guess iOS users will have to authenticate each time they access this page until I run it through PhoneGap or think of a better solution.

dalecosp

Hmm. "curiouser and curiouser", and it's said...

Rather than creating a dir, couldn't you just serve them a unique URL that doesn't necessarily do anything other than identify them?

Mod Rewrite, for example, might work. Or @work we use Apache Type coercion to make oursite.com/listing/12345 simply redirect to "listing" --- which reads the listing ID and serves appropriate content.

Just a thought ....

jeepin81

Just a quick follow-up on this... I ended-up using window.localStorage() & AJAX. Seems to be working. Though, I haven't tested a blackberry yet but I believe Opera supports localStorage.

HTH someone else down the line.

Next step for my project is PhoneGap.