Why is session data lost after redirect in fuelPHP?

Question

I have an odd situation. consider the following scenario:

1. form on page posts to another domain
2. that domain processes data, and posts back to controller A
3. controller A processes returned data, and sets flash session vars
4. controller A redirects to controller B
5. session values set in controller A are lost.

Now, I have noticed that if I eliminate step 4; the session values are not lost. It is only happening after calling Response::redirect().

Following is the relevant code in controller A's post handler (in this case, $vars is set to Input::post(); and the renew() method does a soap call to another API, and returns response data.):

$success_object = $this->renew( $vars );
$persist_through_redirect = array(
    'accountId' => $success_object->account->accountId,
    'expireDate' => $success_object->account->expireDate,
    'createDate' => $success_object->account->createDate,
    'due_amount' => $success_object->account->lastPaymentAmt,
    'offer_name' => $offer_name,
    'member_name' => $vars['first_name'] . ' ' . $vars['last_name']
);
return $this->redirect('success/', $persist_through_redirect);

And this is the code behind method redirect():

private function redirect($redirect_endpoint, $redirect_values = null) { 
    Session::set_flash('flash_redirect', $redirect_values);
    Response::redirect($redirect_endpoint);
}

Finally, here is the code in controller B that accesses the session data:

$information = Session::get_flash('flash_redirect');
if(isset($information)) {
    View::set_global('membership',  $information);
}
// set the locale based on fuel's setting
View::set_global('locale', str_replace( '_', '-', Fuel::$locale ));
return View::forge('successes/success_card');

It gets weirder though. Not all session data is lost. Any session data I had set in the before() method is staying put.

I'm very stumped on this one. Any ideas why my session data is lost?

Answer 1

As it turned out, the core issue was that my session cookie was exceeding 4kb.

What was happening is that when I made a call to Response::redirect(), the script was ending at that point, but also causing a redirect that was hiding the exception being thrown. I added a call to Session::write() just before the redirect, which allowed the exception to not be "hidden" due to page reload.

Once I saw this, it was just a matter of tracking down code that was pushing all of this extra data I did not need, and removing it.