Re: How do sessions work exactly?

All sessions do is give the user a unique id that can be passed from page to page. It does not do any authentication. You will have to do that yourself. You could also look into phplib. I can't recommend it though because I have never used it myself. What I do is start the session then check if there is a session variable $id. If not, the user has not been authenticated, so I send them to a login page where I can authenticate them. After successfully logging in, I register their username as a session variable. Jason Stechschulte jpstech@nc.edu -----Original Message----- From: generic@x.duh [mailto:generic@x.duh]On Behalf Of Generic Player Sent: Friday, July 28, 2000 4:07 AM To: php-general@lists.php.net Subject: [PHP] How do sessions work exactly? I am way lost on sessions. What I am trying to do is have a cookie identify a message board poster. But to prevent people from being able to make their own cookies with someone else's identity contained, I don't want to use a plain old cookie to store their identity. If I understand corectly, a session would send a cookie that contains a unique ID string, and that ID string would the be associated with the variables stored on my server. Is this correct? Assuming that's how its supposed to work, how do I make it work like that? The persons identity will already be stored in a mysql database, can I have the session point to the database itself? What I am doing so far is just using session_register($name, $blarg) in the registering script. So if they register blarg is set to 1, and stored with the name they used as the session. Then, in theory I should be able to call those variables in other pages used to actually post messages right? What exactly do I need to do to be able to access them from the other pages? All I have is session_start() at the beggining of the other pages, and that's not working. Thanks for any help Generic Player