Session cookies, deep mystery. Sherlock Holmes, please Help!

[Nicolae Fieraru]

Hi All,

I have a lot of problems with the web site www.ggsurf.com.au I host on
www.gnxonline.com and I want to find out if it is my own problem or theirs.
I try to use session cookies and it doesn't work fine. Eventually I created
some test scripts, which can be found in here:

www.ggsurf.com.au/info.asp

There is a link to Set the Session("TransactionID") = 25 and the page
set.asp redirects the browser to info.asp after setting the session cookie

The Session("TransactionID") shows as NULL. If you click on the refresh
button in Internet Explorer or click on the link called info, you will see
that the Session("TransactionID") alternates between value 25 and NULL. How
can this be possible? Is it a problem in my scripts or the web server does
something weird?

I am unable to reproduce the problem everytime I try. But if I play for
maybe two minutes with the scripts (clicking on the links to set cookie,
clear cookie, default), eventually I click on Set Session and the value of
the cookie shows as NULL. In that moment, clicking on info will show
alternate values for the Session Cookies.
For your convenience, I created a link to the top logo in default.asp which
brings you back to info.asp

Any idea about this problem would be appreciated. I had many discussions
with the administrators from www.gnxonline.com and they say it is an error
on my side, but they've been unable to provide me any hints or some sample
scripts (I tried using Session.Timeout without solving the problem). And I
don't think it is my problem, as the same script work on three other web
servers.

The only relevant commands I use in the script are:

Session("TransactionID") = 25

and

response.write "Session(""TransactionID"") = " & Session("TransactionID") &
"<br>"


Regards,
Nicolae

 

[Ray Costanzo [MVP]]

The behavior you describe does not happen for me in IE 6.0.2900, Netscape
8.0 Beta (0.9.6) or Firefox 1.0.2. Do you have any anti-cookie software
running, or any sort of Zone Alarm type of nonsense? Do you have your
browsers set to allow cookies?

Ray at home

 

[Nicolae Fieraru]

Hi Ray,

I have similar scripts on other servers on the internet and they work fine
for my computer, therefore I consider it isn't a problem of my computer
settings. It is just this particular web server which causes me problems. I
don't have any anticookie software on the computer.
Thanks for your time. I suppose it didn't happen for you, and this is why it
is even more difficult to track.

Regards
Nicolae

 

[Adam Short]

I too have had strange happenings with Session cookies!

Unfortunately I don't think I've solved them!

One thing you could try is adding the line

Response.AddHeader "P3P", "CP=""CAO PSA OUR"""

to the start of your script, this should tell the latest version of IE6 to
accept session cookies. The latest version of IE now supports the P3P
privacy policies, I think this is where problems are happening.

Regards

Adam