Internet Explorer randomly drops sessions between pages in cakePHP

Question

Hello everyone, I've come across an extremely unusual bug that my team has literally no idea how to solve. Doing some research, I found some similar solutions that I thought would work, but alas did not.

Here is my situation, let me know if I can provide additional insight to help solve the problem.

The first step is that someone chooses a country via a flash map. Flash passes this region name (as well as a date) through the URL, which we then convert to a session. The next page contains no Flash and doesn't display the selected region, but it does hold on to it for further down the process.

Everything works perfectly in Safari and Firefox; however, in IE sometimes unexpected results occur. Frequently (but not always), the session is dropped completely and no sessions are stored between the first and 2nd pages.

Here are the steps that I have taken thus far, unsuccessfully: 1. Changed Security from Medium -> Low 2. Changed CheckUserAgent from True -> False 3. Changed storing of sessions from PHP -> Database

Some additional information that may be useful: I have tried printing out the session data in Debug (debug($_SESSION) on my view file and debug set to 2 in config). In Internet Explorer everything prints out as expected EXCEPT when the region and date don't get set.

For example: If the region and date don't get set NOTHING is printed out for debug. I don't get the session details at the top, and I don't get the normal dump of calls at the bottom of the page either.

I am not using redirection on these pages.

Please let me know if you have ANY idea of what is causing this or any solutions. I am beyond frustrated and have tried as much as I can to solve this.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I'd recommend tracing the cookie information that is exchanged between the server and the browser in both directions. Look at the headers for each request and response and see if the wrong cookie or no cookie is being send at some point. That might help you find the root cause of the problem. I had a similar problem a while back that I was able to solve with this method.

The best way to do that for IE is to use Fiddler.

Answer 2

We had an similar problem at an client deployment, it turned out IE used some proxy server, and by passing the proxy for the cake app resolved it.

Answer 3

This usually happens when "Security.level" set to "high" in your core.php. Try changing to medium or low. This has solved this problem for me before.