Mason + Apache::Session .. strange problems.

[Ian Mahuron]

This will be posted to both the mod_perl and mason mailing lists.

I'm tearing my hair out here.  I'm using Apache::Session with Mason (snippet
of calls to Apache::Session below).  For some reason, when I hit certain
pages with java applets (opencube scroller), and then do a browser "refresh"
(IE5 and NS4.5) Apache::Session die()'s and posts:

[Mon Jan 10 12:27:43 2000] [error] Object does not exist in the data store
at /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.005/Apache/Session/DBIStore.pm line 192.

Which typically happens when you request a session id that's not in the
store.  A quick query reveals that the session is still there:

mysql> SELECT id, length FROM sessions WHERE id='48434f27feea873a';
+------------------+--------+
| id               | length |
+------------------+--------+
| 48434f27feea873a |     41 |
+------------------+--------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Jumping to a page that pulls the cookie from the browser and spits it out
shows that the cookie holds a new value (ie. bc7d790fa9f76185).  Another
query shows that it exists as well:

mysql> SELECT id, length FROM sessions WHERE id='bc7d790fa9f76185';
+------------------+--------+
| id               | length |
+------------------+--------+
| bc7d790fa9f76185 |     41 |
+------------------+--------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

>From what I've found so far, I can query $session for my _session_id.. then
if I request the cookie containing my session ID, I find that it is unset!
So naturally, another session ID is set and I loose all the old data.

So I have a couple questions here:  How is my cookie getting "unset" /
mangled?  How can I tell which "Object does not exist in the data store"
(ie. logging the session id in the error log)?  What's the best way to debug
this?



### Setting up sessions for mason
    my %session;
    my $cookie = $r->header_in('Cookie');
    $cookie =~ s/SESSION_ID=(\w*)/$1/;

    tie %session, 'Apache::Session::DBI', $cookie, {
        DataSource => 'dbi:mysql:mydb',
        UserName   => 'username',
        Password   => 'password'
    };
    $r->header_out("Set-Cookie" => "SESSION_ID=$session{_session_id};") if
 !$cookie );
    local *HTML::Mason::Commands::session = \%session;

    $ah->handle_request($r);

    untie %HTML::Mason::Commands::session;