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PHP session doesn't work with IE

Asked 2008-11-20T17:25:02.630
14

I have a site made with php which uses server side sessions throughout the site.
In fact, it's a site with a user login which depends on session variables and if there were a problem with all session variables, no pages would load at all.

On the site, there's an iframe that holds a feed of little messages from other users.
Those little messages have clickable photos next to them that open the user's profile.
Now, each page requires some formatting to open the user's profile on that specific page...there's really only a few problem pages, but those pages have to have the onclick functions formatted a little differently or they break the page.
So I set a session variable on each page ($_SESSION["current_page"]) that lets the feed know how to format the clickable photos. Now Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari all work as they are supposed to.
But IE6 and IE7 are having problems on the pages that require special formatting.
So after pulling my hair out a bit, I eventually got around to printing my session variables form the server.
And lo and behold, on the special pages, ($_SESSION["current_page"]) is always set to "main" instead of "special1" or "special2".

I printed the same session variable in Firefox and all the other browsers I mentioned and they print out "special1" or "special2" as they're supposed to.
Can anyone think of something - possibly related to the fact that the feed is in an iframe??? - that would cause IE to treat server side session variables differently or somehow launch page "main" silently in the background?
I have checked the feed very carefully for any reference to page "main" - it doesn't seem like there's any ways it's loading that page.

this doesn't make sense to me.

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1 Answer

9

Try testing the page while using some sort of monitoring proxy (I use Fiddler) and see what pages the browser requests. That might give you some clues to what's going on.

Also, try capturing the requests/responses from different browsers and see what IE is doing differently (order of requests, content of requests?).

To pinpoint the problem, can you rewrite the code without using SESSION (it's mentioned in one of the other answers)? Maybe IE is accessing the pages in different order than other browsers? Maybe it is requesting the main page more than once, which means that the session var is set to "main"? Without session variables, the pages won't affect each other's state.

answered 2008-11-20T17:55:49.447

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