Sessions: Firefox vs IE7

[eluser]Michael Wales[/eluser]
Not sure where my original forum account ran off to - so I'm on a new on now. It's probably a good thing - after being away from Code Igniter for so long I feel like a newb again.

Last night, I came across an issue I have never had before. I am placing the blame on a combination of Internet Explorer and poor database design, but I'd still like to get some clarification.

My app is an anonymous survey with the Session class autloading. When the user visits the first page of the survey, a record is completed in the following table:

session_id
poll_position
answer_1
answer_2
answer_3

The poll_position field is updated each time the user answers a question (as is the corresponding answer field) - using the session_id as the "link" between the user and their information within the database.

In Firefox, this worked perfectly. But, in IE, although session information was being stored in my sessions tables - a call to $this->session->userdata('session_id') - always failed. I didn't get around to checking exactly what the return value was on that - but when used within an Active Record GETWHERE it would return an error (and in Firefox it did not).

I've since decided to go a completely different route in managing the storage of information and my users remaining anonymous (just going to place it all in the session), but is this a common issue? It appears as if everyone is switching out to 3rd party session libraries - would Native Session or DBSession correct this issue?

Thanks in advance!

[eluser]JoostV[/eluser]
I had the same problem: session stores fine in FF but not in IE.

This is because IE will not accept a cookie holding session data from a server that runs behind in time. Solution can be found here:
http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/63278/