Codeigniter Destroying My Session Without

So, my current task involves a site where people can sign in, and view a series of training videos on a particular topic. I developed this within CodeIgniter. The only trouble is

Solution 1:

Are you using Firefox and Firebug with extensions (like FirePHP) installed? Because if you are having such a setup, when you open/close the Firebug console, the user-agent string changes, and your session is no longer recognized by CI.

My workaround was to disable FirePHP. Try checking your user-agent string and see if you have something extra besides the default browser user-agent. You should be able to identify it easily. if there is one.

Solution 2:

Well, this may not be a full "answer" per se, but I did come up with a workaround of sorts.

I knew that the problem involved CodeIgniter handling sessions with... how do I put it... stuff running in the background. Originally I was using a CI page within the iFrame. Those "pings" back to the system were what was causing the lockout. So, I now use a regular, flat ol' PHP page within the iFrame. It connects to the database, but doesn't go through CI to do it. I get my "pings" to the table in question, but I don't break the session.

Solution 3:

I had the same problem with session data getting "randomly" destroyed in CodeIgniter and I spent alot of time finding out what was wrong. Now I think i found MY problem, and it seemed as the $this->session->set_flashdata was the culprit.

I noticed that I got logged out on pages where this were used. I also noticed that if you do:

$this->session->set_flashdata('thisItem', 'value');

and later on the same page have the same variable again:

$this->session->set_flashdata('thisItem', 'new value');

then it will destroy the session data every time. Now I removed all the set_flashdata from my site, I havent been logged out since.. hoping this was my problem. When I have the time I will try to rewrite my flashing system to maybe something like if (!isset('thisItem)) { set it; } and stuff like this to prevent it from happening again, because I really want the flash messages.