Sessions

**Pedro Graca** · Jul 17 '05, 02:22 AM

Re: Sessions

James wrote:[color=blue]
> I am confused. What is the differance between cookies and sessions. I
> know cookies are on the client and sessions on the server (where do
> server cookies come in?)?
>
> Can anyone give some real examples as the technical explanations are
> well - technical and I am not sure that I understand the point![/color]

Let's say you have a site with configurable colours :)

User chooses #FF99CC backgroud-color.
You now either send a cookie with that or set a session variable; and
then output your pages with
<?php echo '<body bgcolor="', $_COOKIE['bgcolor']:$_COOKIE['bgcolor']?'#FFFFFF', '">'; ?>
or
<?php echo '<body bgcolor="', $_SESSION['bgcolor']:$_SESSION['bgcolor']?'#FFFFFF', '">'; ?>

Pretty much the same, right?
Well ... tomorrow he returns and if you went for the cookie way he still
sees the pages in #FF99CC; if you went the session way they'll be white
now.

.... getting more complicated now ...
You decide to put the colour data in a database and so send the cookie
with the userid instead of the colour values and get the colour values
with a select:

$sql = "select bgcolor, ... from userprefs where userid={$_COOKI E['userid']}";

but you'll have to that query for every page!!!
So you do it once and save the values in a session variable, and for
every access you have (probably in a included file)

<?php
if (!isset($_SESSI ON['loggedin'])) {
// log user in with $_COOKIE after checking it exists
// set $_SESSION vars including
$_SESSION['loggedin'] = true;
}
?>

Hope this made sense
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