PHP session doesn't work with IE

Question

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.

Answer 1

I thought some people might find the solution to this problem interesting. Fiddler certainly helped here. Thanks to Fiddler, I could see that I was, in fact, hitting the page main.php (thus setting the session variable moments after setting it on the target page), but the server was defaulting there after getting a 302 on the root of the site. This was all happening silently in the background, and before my onload="" javascript ran.

So I was sure something on those pages was causing an error, but not a catastrophic one.

here it is: <img src= "" >

IE was freaking out about the blank src attribute and hitting the server root and the defaulting to page main. I don't fully understand the mechanics happening here. I also don't understand if this is how IE is supposed to behave (it is a malformed img tag after all) or not. Is this a bug?

Answer 2

In most cases, this php line at file begining will be enough:

header('P3P: CP=”NOI ADM DEV PSAi COM NAV OUR OTRo STP IND DEM”');

If it isn't, for IE7 you may also try:

header('P3P: CP=”NOI ADM DEV PSAi COM NAV OUR OTRo STP IND DEM”');

header('Set-Cookie: SIDNAME=ronty; path=/; secure');

header('Cache-Control: no-cache');

header('Pragma: no-cache');

And if that doesn't work for IE6, you may use GET params for session ID:

header('location: land_for_sale.php?phpSESSID='.session_id());

Answer 3

I had this problem, and it was due to the date on my dev box being out. Firefox didn't mind, IE and chrome were seeing the session as being expired as soon as it was set.

Answer 4

IE has cookie issues with it's handling of iFrames which maybe causing the session issue you mention, take a look at these links

http://adamyoung.net/IE-Blocking-iFrame-Cookies

http://gathadams.com/2007/06/25/how-to-set-third-party-cookies-with-iframe-facebook-applications/

http://nileshtrivedi.in/blog/2008/09/01/iframe-cookies-and-internet-explorer/

Answer 5

Check the name of the server machine. IE has problems with machine names that contain '-' or '_' - they cannot maintain a session! I've had this problem twice in the past, and it always takes me weeks to figure out, and I'm shocked IE hasn't fixed it.

Just rename the machine to have no strange characters! You can get it working if you just use the IP address of the server in the url to test.

Answer 6

I have the same problem and it's SOLVED now.

The blank or empty attribute's values of any IMG tags cause the problem. For me, I used JavaScript to change IMG object's source to an empty value. Doing that could also make the problem.