Saving Browser State without Cookies

Luca Fini lfini at arcetri.astro.it
Wed Feb 6 04:35:06 EST 2002


On Tue, 5 Feb 2002, Gerson Kurz wrote:

> On Tue, 5 Feb 2002 12:48:29 -0700, "Orr, Steve" <sorr at rightnow.com>
> wrote:
> > 
> >I need to migrate a web application from PHP to Python and I have a
> >requirement to save state info WITHOUT using cookies where much of the state
> >data MUST not be visible to the end users. The PHP application allows users

I made a DB interface years ago which maintained state from one step to 
the following without using cookies. It was written in perl, but the 
technique has nothing to do with the language used.

It was based on the "HIDDEN" field of HTML Forms. If you define such a 
field in a form generated by your application, it is sent back by the 
browser when the form data are sent as any other field in the same form.

The HIDDEN field is not invisible to the user (he can look at it by 
showing the HTML source) but neither are cookies, so you solve the problem 
exactly in the same way as you do for cookies:  you might encode 
the status information as you like, perhaps using criptography.

I hope this is helpful,
					l.f.
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