[cpscdave]

I've been working on a bill_payment area for a stie we maintain. and a really weird thing just happened.

I was working on some code that in no way shape or form touched sessions, and all of the sudden the system wouldnt save any session information.

I checked the usual problems, the disk wasnt full, the system could write to the save dir.
rebooted my computer, tried a different computer

Banged my head for almost an hour.

Finally commented out a section of code which (I was goign to delete anyways cause its not needed) doest touch sessions in any way shape or form but is BEFORE session_start and is different from the section of code I was working on when this happened. and all of the sudden its started to work again...

really wierd....

anyone have any other ideas of what might have been going on???

I'd love to try and figure out what caused it before we launch this into production

[cpscdave]

grrr its happened again :@ dont know whats going on. Any suggestions would be loved

[MMJ]

Originally Posted by http://php.net/session_start

Note: If you are using cookie-based sessions, you must call session_start() before anything is outputted to the browser.

[cpscdave]

Yep have that in there.

The relevant code is: (guess I should've posted this yesterday)

PHP Code:

session_start();

if(!isset($_SESSION['generated']))
 {
   $_SESSION['generated'] = time();
   $stage = 1;
   echo "new session";
 }
else
 {
   if(time() - $_SESSION['generated'] < $MAX_TIME)
   {
     $_SESSION['generated'] = time();  //refresh the value;
     echo "session refreshed";

   }
   else
   {
     /*
      * more time than allowed has passed, destory the session will force them
      * to restart from the start
      */
     //explicitlly dump everything in the session array
     foreach(array_keys($_SESSION) AS $key)
     {
       $_SESSION[$key]='3242rerfdasklf';
       unset($_SESSION[$key]);
     }
     session_destroy();
     echo "I'm sorry too much time has elapsed. Please refresh to restart";
     $restart = true;

   }
 } 


[MMJ]

I thought you said you have code 'BEFORE' session_start()?

[cpscdave]

Ya just setting a couple flags like MAX_TIME

I think I may have found the culprit. We link into the framework that we use and in there a couple ini settings were being change specifically it looks as if it was forcing php to use cookies for the sessions.

I think it was getting confused jumping back and forth between client side and server side session tracking.

Since making that change I havent been able to get the problem to happen again... but cause it's inconsitant I'm not 100% sure.

[MMJ]

Originally Posted by cpscdave

Ya just setting a couple flags like MAX_TIME

I think I may have found the culprit. We link into the framework that we use and in there a couple ini settings were being change specifically it looks as if it was forcing php to use cookies for the sessions.

I think it was getting confused jumping back and forth between client side and server side session tracking.

Since making that change I havent been able to get the problem to happen again... but cause it's inconsitant I'm not 100% sure.

The default is for PHP to use cookies for sessions: http://www.php.net/session