跨页面发出持久会话变量

Question

First of all a little bit of background on my setup:

• I have a local domain name set up, projects.lumesse.com.
• PHP version is 5.4.16 running on IIS 7.
• Testing in Chrome (latest stable build).

The problem is as follows:

I have a function called 'getVariable' as follows:

function getVariable($name, $default = "") {
    if(isset($_POST[$name])) return $_POST[$name];
    if(isset($_GET[$name])) return $_GET[$name];
    if(isset($_SESSION[$name])) return $_SESSION[$name];
    return $default;
}

Going through this function line by line it returns the post variable if it exists, followed by the get variable, followed by the session variable followed by the default (if none of the others exist).

In another include, which is included directly after the functions include, I have the following line:

$_SESSION["Language"] = getVariable("Language", "FR");

This works fine if I put ?Language=DE - the site displays in German as expected. However from the line above I'd expect that the language is persisted if I strip off the querystring.

The first time this page is hit, with ?Language=DE, it should return the get variable. The line above then sets the session variable. Any calls to this function after this would therefore return the session variable, right?

It is actually returning FR, the default, in the case that no language parameter exists, even if I've set the language beforehand.

Any ideas on what I'm missing would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

Found the answer - I'm used to coding in classic ASP and .net which don't need a line to initialise the session. Solution was to put session_start() in the main includes file.