Help with SESSION vars, please?

[Donny Bahama]

I'm having a lot of trouble with session variables. They seem to be very unreliable and unset themselves at unexpected times. I figured out that you have to do a session_commit() before redirecting (and pass the sid to the new url), but now I'm finding that session vars will sometimes unset just by posting a form - even when it's posting to the same page.

Are there some good, hard rules that you seasoned vets live by in order to use SVs reliably? If so, can you please post them?

Many thanks!

[grahame]

Odd - I've never had any problems. They're rock solid for me.

A thought - are you using multiple connections to the same session at the same time - for example are you using frames, or session based PHP scripts to generate muliple content in the same page at the same time, such as a whole series of related images?

[Donny Bahama]

Nope. Nothing funky like that. The closest thing to funky that I've got going on is that I'm testing on IE5.5 using a local (xampp) web server. (I seem to have similar problems even if I test on FF, tho, so maybe it's a xampp issue.)


Thanks for the help, Graham.

[Donny Bahama]

It occurred to me that maybe my expectations of session vars are too high...

I expect my session vars to be there because I expect the sid to remain the same... but as I'm posting forms and doing redirects, the sid does change. Maybe that's my problem? Maybe they're rock solid for you because you expect the sid to change? So, to insure proper use of session vars I need to pass the sid in a cookie (that expires at the end of the session) OR in the url?

I can see where the url would be the more reliable, in case cookies are disabled, but the advantage of the cookie would be that the sid would be retained even after the user leaves the "framework" of the current page (i.e. where the code is specifically written to pass the sid in the URL). If the user goes to another page/area of the site, then returns to this page via the nav bar (the link for which, naturally, does not contain a parameter to pass the sid), then the cookie would keep me from having to do all of the "no session var" processing again.

Is that a more realistic expectation? Or do session vars work for you without "jumping through those hoops"?