Apache::Cookie - weird values returned...

[Eric Sammer <er...@linuxstep.org>]

All:

I've got a strange Apache::Cookie issue that seems to have recently 
snuck up on me, although I've seen similar behavior in the past.

I have a PerlAccessHandler called GroupAccess that handles all access to 
a site**. If there's a user_id cookie, it pulls urls allowed to that 
user from a db, otherwise, an "anonymous" set of urls that are allowed - 
certainly not rocket science. The problem is that the logout handler 
(which expires the user_id cookie) kills the cookie and redirects to / 
ok, but when the GroupAccess handler checks if the cookie exists (during 
the / request), $cookies->{user_id}* is defined, but the value seems to 
be an empty string ala "". This really makes things difficult. What is 
weird is that the Apache::Cookie object DOES exist, it's just the value 
that's all wacked out or just plain missing. Could it be bug in 
Apache::Cookie that only shows up during internal redirects (and when 
I'm not looking)? This problem is incredibly difficult to reproduce as 
it only happens about 1 out of ever 30 - 40 times... That said, when it 
does happen, users complain and that's not cool at all.

* $cookies is a hash ref with cookie names as keys and Apache::Cookie 
objects as values.

** The site in question: http://www.bluemonkeystuff.com

Thanks in advance!

-- 
Eric Sammer
eric@linuxstep.org
http://www.linuxstep.org