Strange! MS Office docs, when opened on my CI site, cause the session to be lost

[eluser]skattabrain[/eluser]
I have a CI app and I've written a tool that allows the users to upload their important MS Office files. So this works great, and on my client, I have no problems opening these files.

However, it turns out, on my clients network, opening any of these files from the web server causes the client to lose their session. I've gone crazy trying to understand what is going on, but I've narrowed it done to this ...

Client goes to page, I scan a directory using the file helper and present a list of all their uploaded office documents. I can set a meta refresh on this page and watch it refresh for hours and it will not lose the session. I use a php timestamp to ensure I'm not looking at cache.

When a user clicks a link to a WORD doc ... it opens in a new browser window/tab. If I leave that open, then continue using the site, my session still works fine.

The second I close the tab/window on the office doc (btw - loaded inside IE 7), it at that seconds destroys the session and the user is logged off.

Anyone ever run into this?

[eluser]skattabrain[/eluser]
do you think an htaccess rewrite rule could cause this? like CI first looks for a controller by the name of the file, then does some redirect to tfile after it sees it's not a controller?

Here's my htaccess ...

Code:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php/$1 [L]

</IfModule>

[eluser]skattabrain[/eluser]
Clapping with 1 hand today it seems!

So anyways, for those that are dealing with this, I did find a fix and improved user experience at the same time, because opening up Office files in the browser has always and does ... suck anyways! PDF's too ... but that's just me. But Office files in the browser just suck.

I added this to my htaccess to force certain file types to open in their native application.

Code:

<FilesMatch "\.(doc|docx|xls|xlsx|ppt|pptx|rtf|pdf)$">
ForceType application/octet-stream
Header set Content-Disposition attachment
</FilesMatch>

[eluser]BrianDHall[/eluser]
Wow, that's great. I couldn't figure how it could possibly cause a session problem, but at least that fixes it for you.

I was going to suggest trying to sniff out the headers and save your sessions in a database so you can browse them easier, to see if CI is killing the session or if the browser is just losing the cookie for some reason.

[eluser]skattabrain[/eluser]
I suspect it was something header related, but I don't know ... on my home and office networks I couldn't make it happen anyways. I was remotely using a browser on his network because I couldn't lose the session.

I'm using an up to date OS/browser on my dev box ... I really think it was Office blowing something up.

Didn't think of capturing the headers.

[eluser]CroNiX[/eluser]
Did you try opening them in an iframe?

[eluser]AlexKrenvalk[/eluser]
[quote author="skattabrain" date="1259188701"]Clapping with 1 hand today it seems!

So anyways, for those that are dealing with this, I did find a fix and improved user experience at the same time, because opening up Office files in the browser has always and does ... suck anyways! PDF's too ... but that's just me. But Office files in the browser just suck.

I added this to my htaccess to force certain file types to open in their native application.

Code:

<FilesMatch "\.(doc|docx|xls|xlsx|ppt|pptx|rtf|pdf)$">
ForceType application/octet-stream
Header set Content-Disposition attachment
</FilesMatch>

[/quote]
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