Cookie problem

[gary@microadvice.com]

I am developing am XHTML application hosted on an IIS Windows 2000 box.
For the mobile side I am using the Mobile Internet Toolkit's default simulator.
The problem is with cookies.
I am setting 3 cookies and I know this is occuring because I can examine the http headers in the "session" tab and see that they were sent.
When I look at the "Cookies" tab, I see only the ASPSESSION cookie.
I have a page which will display the cookies that the browser has sent with the request and it shows:
Cookie = ASPSESSIONIDAAQTSQQC=CMENPKCBLEOCBGBLOOPBPFHK; domain=localhost; path=/:
I shouldn't be getting back domain and path.
If I run this same code under IE6, it works perfectly.
What's up??

[presentTech]

Hi!
I am getting the same problem with both Nokia 3650 and Nokia 7650.

Have you already solved your problem?

Does any one have any hint on how can the problem be solved?


Thanks in advance,
Victor Batista

[gary@microadvice.com]

re: I am getting the same problem with both Nokia 3650 and Nokia 7650.

Are you using the real devices or simulators (I am currently using
the simulators, while waiting for the actual devices to be rolled out in my area).

The only way I have found around it is to get the devices's
IP address from the HTTP headers and use that as a key
into a session database table where I store and retrieve
what otherwise would have been in cookies.

I am wondering why Nokia has never responded to this post!

[presentTech]

Hi!
We are using the real devices.
We have implemented a system similar to yours to manage sessions. We use the MSISDN header to maintain sessions. Although, we have a problem with this solution, because our system will have a few replicated servers, with load balancing Hardware in front of them. This way we can't load balance, having all the requests from the same user (session) delivered to the same server.

Thanks in advance,
Victor Batista

[gary@microadvice.com]

Hi Victor,

If you put the session data in an actual row in the database
then you should be able to load balance.

How many individual sessions/day are you expecting?

Wireless data services are just catching on in North America
so I'm not sure what kinds of loads to expect.

Can you give me some hints as to your server farm configuration and the load it is designed to handle.

thanx

gary

[presentTech]

Hi!
We are using the real devices.
We have implemented a system similar to yours to manage sessions. We use the MSISDN header to maintain sessions. Although, we have a problem with this solution, because our system will have a few replicated servers, with load balancing Hardware in front of them. This way we can't load balance, having all the requests from the same user (session) delivered to the same server.

Thanks in advance,
Victor Batista

[tychay]

These are two separate problems, BTW. I can confirm both are bugs with the Nokia. Problem 1. The Series 60 emulator improperly adds the path and domain in the request cookie. Problem 2. The Nokia 3650 (and I assume other Series 60) do not handle session cookies.

Problem 1: When I use the Series60 emulator cookies seem to handle fine with PHP. Note that if the emulator is sending the
....; path=...; domain=...
along with the end of the cookie (which is clearly wrong, I might add), then things should be okay if your cookie handler is robust enough. How robust? Basically you can't name any cookie "path" or "domain" and it should ignore things it can't urldecode (assuming path and domain isn't urlencoded). If your program can't handle that (and it sounds like ASP can't), then you'll have to trap the incoming Cookie header and regenerate the cookies (filtering out "path" and "domain").

BTW, I can confirm that the Series 60 Content Authoring SDK (Nokia WAP Gateway Simulator, WinXP) seems to incorrectly be putting an extra "; domain=...; path=..." to the cookie response.

Problem 2. However, when using an actual phone (Nokia 3650 through TZone gateway), the session cookie is not returned AT ALL! This is because the Nokia 3650 doesn't seems to have support for any session cookies (i.e. cookies with no expiration date on them):
http://discussion.forum.nokia.com/fo...1727#post61727

I think this may be related to the fact that these same platforms seem to not be caching images, stylesheets, and pages (assuming proper headers sent). I guess the thing works on paper (according to Nokia's documentation), but definitely not in practice!