How does Zencart actually use cookies?

[jmouse]

I must admit to being a bit confused about how ZenCart is actually using cookies.


I have the 'Force Cookie Use' parameter set to False, and I can still use all the facilities even with my browser set to not accept cookies. Even my shopping cart was maintained between sessions (was that because I was logged in?)

What are they used for? Am I looking at the right settings?

Thanks

[DrByte]

What exactly are you trying to do?
In 99% of cases there is no need to touch that setting. Zen Cart will normally automatically do what's necessary if cookies are disabled etc.

It's almost never necessary to edit any of the settings in the Admin->Config->Sessions area. It is recommended to leave these at their default setting.

[DrByte]

1. Go to http://your_site.com/index.php?main_page=cookie_usage for a partial explanation

2. Zen Cart uses cookies to store the temporary session number so that it doesn't need to be passed on the URL. It's a session cookie. If the cookie cannot be set, it typically just adds &zenid=blahblah to the URL on every page.

[jmouse]

Thanks for this.

I was asked, by a client, exactly how the cookies worked - and it occurred to me I didn't know!

[hareslade]

Can I ask a question on the tail of this one?

Can zencart use a cookie for automatically logging in a user, from a users cookie?

It would be nice to set up a particular cart so that existing users don't have to log in every time they run their browser afresh

if it can't be set up in admin, I could add a user cookie myself I suppose...

[DrByte]

Zen Cart is not presently built to do this.
Some have tackled this concept via a contribution which you can find in the downloads section.

I suggest you ensure that you tell your customers that you're storing their personal information in cookies if you intend to do that.

[hareslade]

Thanks for your reply Dr Byte
Yes indeed I found the auto logon thread, in the past few days I've used the contrib, but there seems to be probs 'for me' with various aspects as far as my experience as a user running it goes, with a dot com domain.

I wonder if its a possibility to store the cookie as data in the database, that's to define whether this cart user is an auto logon user, or not. The damn browsers seem to have got so particular about the domain name format for cookie path, and each browser's doing different checks.

Plus I suspect there are issues about exactly when the server updates session variables to \tmp disc file, inside a page creation process which assigns new session variable values within it, then we assume the rest of the page php code will see the session values update immediately.

my brain hurts.. but a transparent auto log on would be a useful zencart feature.. if you want to help out, see my 3 recent thread posts in that auto logon contrib's thread.. i'm feeling my way over there..

[janekbar5]

Hi I made something like this
1 I got url www.my-shop.com/cookie.php?user_ident=adwords
2 someone who enter this link will recive cooki “adwords” and is redirected to main page of shop.
3 I’d like to add extra column “user_ident” in order table , so after a purechase I could see from which source user has come (it will be many sources) similar like we can see IP
4 My problem is I can’t see value of my cookie when I’m logged in I use echo and nothing is displayed althought I got this cookie in browser and it works on my example file outside zencart.
Do I need declare this cookie in other files of zencart?

[jszemmel]

Did you sort this out - we are joining a second affiliate network and need to overwrite a cookie everytime someone gets to our site from a diffrent affiliate network..

Please advise how to achieve that

[janekbar5]

Didn't have a time yet to take closer look to this. But hope will sort this soon.