Problem with PHP Session Variables

Question

Hello all,
I am in the process of converting an internal company site
from ASP/Access to PHP/MySQL. All was going well until I started
working with User Authentication involving access level. No matter
what I do I can't seem to shake the MM_UserGroup variable.
I have a link on the main page that is variable dependent on
the access level of the user. If the user is logged in as a
Supervisor they should see a link to the supervisor control panel.
If logged in as a user or not logged in at all, they should see a
link to the supervisor login page.
I have put a Restrict Access function on the supervisor
control panel and it functions as usual. When logged in as a
supervisor I have access. When logged in as a user or not logged in
at all, I don't.
It seems that my homepage always sees the MM_UserGroup
variable set as "Supervisor". I can log in as a user, close the
browser, restart the server, everything and it always sees the
variable set as "Supervisor". Just to make sure I wasn't crazy I
put in an echo function so that it would display "MM_UserGroup". It
always says "Supervisor" no matter what I do. Using echo to show
the MM_Username variable, it functions as expected. When I close
the browser and reopen it, I get a nice error as expected because
there is no one logged in at that time. I still see "Supervisor"
staring me in the face though.
I'm sure it's something simple that I'm missing, not being an
experienced PHP user.
Any thoughts from the experts out there?
Thanks in advance,
David

Answer 1

aidan81 wrote:
> immediately upon login for a user, I see "User" printed
as expected. Once I
> use this page to edit their status, I am redirected back
to the main page as
> expected and immediately see "Supervisor" staring at me.
If I then revisit the
> user's edit page, it now says "Supervisor". Seems that
something screwy is
> going on and I'm at a loss....
It sounds as though you are reassigning the value of the
variable. If my
memory serves me right, ASP uses a single equal sign to
perform a
comparison. PHP uses two.
Check that you don't have something like this in your code:
if ($_SESSION['Authority'] = 'Supervisor') {
// do something
That will assign Supervisor to $_SESSION['Authority'].
It should be this:
if ($_SESSION['Authority'] == 'Supervisor') {
// do something
David Powers, Adobe Community Expert
Author, "The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3" (friends of
ED)
Author, "PHP Solutions" (friends of ED)
http://foundationphp.com/