I am trying to use PHP session without using cookies. I have enabled session.use_trans_sid and disabled session.use_cookies in my php.ini file. I have also disabled cookies in my firefox browser. Now, when I navigate between pages, I am unable to access the variable in the session object set from a previous page. BTW, I am aware that using session IDs as part of the URL is not a recommended approach.
I have provided the sample code snippet below for the two pages – page1.php and page2.php. Page1.php sets a variable in the session object to true and page2.php checks this variable’s value and takes action accordingly.
Page1.php
<?php
session_start();
if (isset($_REQUEST["user"]))
{
$_SESSION["name"] = true;
$host = $_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"];
$path = dirname($_SERVER["PHP_SELF"]);
header("Location: http://$host$path/page2.php");
exit;
}
?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<title>Page1</title>
</head>
<body>
<form method="get" action="/page1.php">
Name:<input type="text" name="user"/><br/>
<input type="submit" value="Login"/><br/>
</form>
</body>
</html>
page2.php
<?php
session_start();
if ($_SESSION["name"])
{
echo("<h1>Name set.</h1>");
}
else
{
echo("<h1>Name NOT set.</h1>");
}
?>
I have resolved the issue. Looks like php will not pass the session ID during re-directs as part of the re-direction URL even if the re-direct is to a page within the same website. This is why the session variable was not available within page2.php above and the output was always “Name NOT set”. So I changed my re-direct URL on page1.php to have the session ID as part of it & that did the trick.