Posted by Gordon Burditt on 10/09/97 11:28

>In fact the session variable is also used to avoid worring about such GET or
>POST variables.
>Let's explain: the user make a search about a shoe make.

If the user is searching for a shoe make, he might want to bookmark
one of the results so he can come back to it later (perhaps he's
comparison shopping with other sites).

>Then he looks trough the results, changing some pages, going inside articles
>to see details, and so on, then want to perform an other search.
>At every page, I've to worry about 10-20 variables every time. Putting them
>in a session variable, I may ask the variable when needed, without worring
>if I passed between all pages. For this I created a bounch of functions to
>store and retrieve variable very easely, and it's a pain saving as you don't
>forget to pass variables between pages.
>
>That's the main reason we used sessions variable. We don't need to worry
>about bookmarking such pages, as they are dynamic.

You do need to worry about bookmarking such pages, especially if
you're selling something. If the user can't come back to the page,
you may lose a sale. Now, some things shouldn't be bookmarked (like
a customer's list of what's currently in his shopping basket, or a
partially-completed order, or a map to the store based on the
customer's location), but pages for individual items for sale should
be bookmarkable.

"dynamic pages" are usually an implementation detail. If the
contents of the page depends on things like the item number, search
terms, category, etc. and not on the customer's ID number, customer's
password, or customer's geographic location, chances are it should
be bookmarkable.

>We may use UrlRewrite
>later for such needs (altrough we didn't look at this function yet)
>Also for Google, we provided a sitemap in order to get all articles without
>the need to worry about dynamic pages.

Gordon L. Burditt

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