So I am working on a site that uses a customer membership provider I wrote so I can use my own database schema. Pretty simple, I added in a feature where in the config you can pick which table and fields to select from the database as well as a list of cookies to set when a user logs in. This makes it easy for me to use on any database I end up with, here is the web.config:
<membership defaultProvider=“EcommerceMembershipProvider“>
<providers>
<add name=“MyMembershipProvider“ type=“MyMembershipProvider“ connectionStringName=“myConnectionString“ membershipTable=“Customer“ username=“EmailAddress“ password=“Password“ setAdditionalCookies=“True“ cookieList=“EmailAddress, CustomerID, ShipState“ selectFields=“EmailAddress, Password, CustomerID, ShipState“/>
</providers>
</membership>
As you can see I am setting 3 cookies, EmailAddress, CustomerID, and ShipState. So far so good.
I also needed a feature in the admin of the site so the site administrator could easily log as differnt users by click a special link in the admin – here’s where I started getting very weird behavior.
The auto login page I link to loads, calls my membership provider, logs the user in, sets the cookies and redirects to the page I want. This works great on FF, not so much on IE 7. I noticed that I always had 2 sets of cookies, one for the administrator that was logged in (admins use the same membership provider but have a different role assigned to them) and one for the user that I tried to auto login as.
But this only happens in IE 7?
It was always my understanding that setting a value of a cookie that already exists overwrites the value that was currently there, not creates a second duplicate. And this was only happening in IE 7.
Here is my code for setting the cookies from my membership provider:
HttpContext.Current.Response.Cookies(cookieName.Trim).Value = dr.Item(cookieName.Trim).ToString
HttpContext.Current.Response.Cookies(cookieName.Trim).Expires = DateAdd(DateInterval.Month, 1, Date.Now)
Seems like it should work to me? I search everywhere, just Google actually, and couldn’t find anyone having a similar problem. I came across the Cookies Overview page at MS and it occured to me that maybe the cookie path for these sets of cookies differs for some reason.
So I added the following to my cookie setting code:
HttpContext.Current.Response.Cookies(cookieName.Trim).Path = “/store”
Problem solved! Not exactly sure why, but hey IE 7 now works.
If anyone has any insight as to why this might happen please let me know.
