NYCPHP Meetup

[betenoir at echonyc.com]

I am working on shopping cart that allows the user to review and revise her
imformation.

Input -> Review ->Submit or

Input ->Review -> Revise   <->Review -> Submit

We post data to a third party credit card processor and then the 3rd party
hands off  to our site.  This is because there is user information we need
to process if and only if the user successfully completes the credit card
transaction.

I am using PHP to manage the session.  We discovered that sometimes the
user information is not preserved.  I wrote a fix to explicitly save that
data in a cookie rather than rely on the PHP session info by reading the
$_POST data into a string and saving it as a cookie.

After testing fairly thoroughly we have discovered that IE6 is remarkably
inconsistent in how it passes cookies and form data from page to page.

It is better at $_POST info but a long way from reliable. It is less
reliable when it comes to cookies. Of course there is the possibility that
I am missing something obvious.

I register my session variables on all pages except the final cookie
reading page.

Of course it's a little difficult to fix a problem that appears
intermittently *on the same machine* and without apparent rhyme or reason.
Any insights into this idiosyncratic behavior?

TIA,

Clyde