user has to login each time they click a link on search page

[plainsgoddess]

Currently, my site uses sessions for authentication. I have no problem indexing the website. However, when a user performs a search, they get a list of links (pages). Everything works great to this point. Then the user clicks one the links, and is kicked back to the login page. I can't figure out how to code the links in such a way that the user won't have to login every time he clicks a new link on the search page.

Example:
Link in List
http://www.amered.com/dists/catalog/sales_meeting.php

What it should be to process correctly
http://www.amered.com/dists/catalog/...0abdbfc0c32b6c

Thank you for any assistance you can offer. This is a great tool and works wonderfully on all of my sites except this one.

[Ray]

There are many different ways a site can use sessions for authentication or track users throughout a site. Because of this, there is no single solution which can work for all methods, and it will always depend on how a particular site is implementing this specifically.

Does your site use any form of cookies for sessions? From the URL and example given, you seems to imply that it depends entirely on the GET parameter (ie. "?osCsid=xxx") being passed to every single page of your site. How do your sessions expire, etc.?

If it does indeed depend entirely on the GET parameter for session information, then we are not sure how you could have indexed the site without them in the URLs.

The example you give seem to indicate that Zoom had not gotten a session ID, which means it could not have indexed the pages properly (it would have gotten a login screen at every page). One exception to this would be if you have coded your site up so that it automatically allows access to the Indexer in some way (by identifying its User-Agent string, or the computer's IP, etc.). Check if this is the case, or if you've only had the login page indexed multiple times (at different URLs). You should be able to look more closely at the context description and search words that do not appear in the login page. More information here:
http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/support...lems.html#auth

[plainsgoddess]

user has to login each time they click a link on search page

"The example you give seem to indicate that Zoom had not gotten a session ID, which means it could not have indexed the pages properly (it would have gotten a login screen at every page). "

That's exactly what happened. I am using OS Commerce, which does have it's own search function in the catalog, but I wanted to use Zoom because it is a much better search tool.

Thank you again for any advice you can offer. Please let me know if you need me to elaborate more.
Robbin

[Ray]

Refer to the link provided above. Your site's server-side scripting / backend will have to allow Zoom access in some way. For example, it could recognize its User-Agent name ("ZoomSpider - wrensoft.com") or the IP address of the indexing computer.

The best solution would be to check if there's a way to enable the use of cookies for tracking sessions in "OS Commerce". You can then login with IE immediately prior to indexing (allowing it to index the proper site content without the need for session ID parameters), and when users click on a search result, their authentication would be verified via cookies rather than the URL.