coexistence of oscommerce and my session variables

[sdavid14]

i'm new to oscommerce, so bear with me.

i'm trying to integrate oscommerce into my existing PHP site, such that upon login into oscommerce, i execute some of my PHP code that does a db lookup and sets session variables that i use later in my application.

i've not met with success, as it seems that the application_top.php is doing something with the user session that i can't seem to figure out. i've boiled my problem down to the following code test cases that dont' seem to work:

set_session.php:

<?php
require('includes/application_top.php');
session_start();
$_SESSION['customer_id']="1234";
header("Location: retrieve_session.php");
require(DIR_WS_INCLUDES . 'application_bottom.php');
?>

retrieve_session.php:

<?php
require('includes/application_top.php');
session_start();
echo "customer id: " .$_SESSION['customer_id'];
require(DIR_WS_INCLUDES . 'application_bottom.php');
?>

i expect to see:

customer id: 1234

but instead i see:

customer id:


what's my fundamental misunderstanding here?

[jonthewebb]

bah

I just wrote a long reply and it went missing

anyway, the gist of it was, use tep_session_register() inside application_top if you can, then it will work. Um, don't know if that's any help, depends what you're trying to do.

Oh yes and you shouldn't need to call session_start again as application_top does that already.


jon

[sdavid14]

Thank you! Your advice got me on the right track.

The other problem i was having was that i was trying to redirect the user after logging in (login.php) to a non-oscommerce page via the following, hoping to preserve the session variables :

tep_redirect("registered.php");

turns out that the wrapper function tep_href_link is needed to make sure the session is passed along with it (on the querystring, if necessary).

tep_redirect(tep_href_link("registered.php"));

I appreciate the help, hope this can help someone else in the future...

[jonthewebb]

yes, I used to have all sorts of problems until I started using the tep_ functions where possible. So much is built in or dependent on them that little bits start flaking off if you don't use them. A good plough through the includes/functions and includes/classes is very useful. I have re-used many of the functions for other projects too. tep_not_null() is useful.


jon