SESSION HELL ... solved.

[jscnet]

Regarding the thread "SESSION HELL... Please Help."

I solved it.

Maybe it was me, maybe it just wasn't clearly documented... dunno -- either way -- it was frustrating...

Just FYI to all newbies to SESSIONS:

When you have a FORM, and some fields in that form... those fields are given HTML names (for example, name="first_name", etc..)

I was registering the HTML Input Name with SESSION_REGISTER() -- what I discovered is, you have to create individual session Variables independent of your Input Name Variables.

So, for example -- if I want to store the first_name field data into a session variable I would do something like:

session_start()
session_register("fName");

if($first_name != "")
{
$fName = $first_name;
}

Although this might seem obvious to some -- my thinking was that I needed to register the existing HTML Input Variables -- nope.

A SESSION must have it's own set of variables.

I hope this helps someone.

Jason

[Anon]

I think it depends on when you register the session vars, because in my recent scripts I have registered them as the same value as the name attrib in the HTML form. I registred them on the page that would display the form (eg. not that page that handles the form as that would erase the posted values)

The only problems i had were with values from check boxes because of the way a textbox is passed as a variable (it either exists and is on, or doesnt exist at all) If the user selected to turn it on, and then went back and tried to disable it, the session variable would not be updated because there would not be an actual post of the variable. To solve this you can simplly use a separate variable for the session as you described above.

[jscnet]

It didn't work for me at all! -- the only way the SESSION worked, was to create independent vars, then assign those session vars the values of the form vars... it's works perfectly -- and it's so clean.

Honestly -- I cannot see it working for you at all (at least) over several pages, where you need to access the data... dunno if you read the orginal thread "SESSION HELL... Please Help." -- but in there you will see that the problem is not simply posting the data to the session file... but updating the data in a session file... also, the SID seems to want to disappear.

Creating independent session vars seems to cure this. I just wish SESSIONS were better documented... 😉 -- I spent way too much time dealing with this nightmare... my site could have been done by now -- lol.

Thanks.
Jason

PS. You will notice a change in the session file. If you look at a session file where you register the FORM vars instead of independent vars -- you'll see just the assignment var (ie. [say] first_name|) -- when you assign an independent session var, you'll see an "!" in-front of the assignment var -- (ie. !fName|)

This somehow affects the way session vars are delt with when (at least) it comes to updating data.

It also is a good visual (debug) to see if you accidently registered a FORM var instead.