I am experiencing a strange behaviour of my application in Chrome browser (No problem with other browsers). When I refresh a page, the cookie is being sent properly, but intermittently the browser doesn’t seem to pass the cookie on some refreshes.
This is how I set my cookie:
$identifier = / some weird string /;
$key = md5(uniqid(rand(), true));
$timeout = number_format(time(), 0, '.', '') + 43200;
setcookie('fboxauth', $identifier . ":" . $key, $timeout, "/", "fbox.mysite.com", 0);
This is what I am using for page headers:
header("Last-Modified: " . gmdate("D, d M Y H:i:s") . " GMT");
header("Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate"); // HTTP/1.1
header("Expires: Thu, 25 Nov 1982 08:24:00 GMT"); // Date in the past
Do you see any issue here that might affect the cookie handling? Thank you for any suggestion.
EDIT-01:
It seems that the cookie is not being sent with some requests. This happens intermittently and I am seeing this behaviour for ALL the browsers now. Has anyone come across such situation? Is there any situation where a cookie will not be sent with the request?
EDIT-02:
Here are the HTTP Headers:
Request Method:GET Status Code:200 OK
REQUEST HEADERS
Accept:application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5 Referer:http://fbox.mysite.com/dashboard User-Agent:Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.1.249.1045 Safari/532.5
RESPONSE HEADERS
Cache-Control:no-cache, must-revalidate Content-Length:8903 Content-Type:text/html Date:Tue, 06 Apr 2010 09:25:26 GMT Expires:Thu, 25 Nov 1982 08:24:00 GMT Last-Modified:Tue, 06 Apr 2010 09:25:26 GMT Pragma:no-cache Server:Microsoft-IIS/7.5 X-Powered-By:PHP/5.3.1 ZendServer
Thanks again, for any guideline.
The only thing I can think of, having seen your header information, is that PHP is outputting something before you set the cookie. If that is the case, setcookie should return false and you’ll get a warning “Cannot send session Cookie – headers already sent” As Bart S. suggests, turn on
error_reporting(E_ALL)and try outputting the return value of setcookie to verify this isn’t the case.Also, try just using
setcookiein the basic case with just a name and value and check the response headers again. Then cut out all of your code except for the setcookie and if that works, bring all your code back using divide and conquer 🙂