Example of information stored in session variables

You’re working on a site with a large audience of senior citizens. In Dreamweaver, you add two links to the start page that let users customize the size of the site’s text. For larger, easy-to-read text, the user clicks one link, and for regular-size text, the user clicks another link.

Each link has a URL parameter called fontsize that submits the user’s text preference to the server, as the following Macromedia ColdFusion example shows:

<a href="resort.cfm?fontsize=large">Larger Text</a><br>
<a href="resort.cfm?fontsize=small">Normal Text</a>

You decide to store the user’s text preference in a session variable and use it to set the font size on each page the user requests.

Near the top of the destination page, you enter the following code to create a session called font_pref that stores the user’s font size preference.

ColdFusion

<CFSET session.font_pref = url.fontsize>

ASP and ASP.NET

<% Session("font_pref") = Request.QueryString("fontsize") %>

When the user clicks the hypertext link, the page sends the user’s text preference in a URL parameter to the destination page. The code on the destination page stores the URL parameter in the font_pref session variable. For the duration of the user’s session, all the pages of the application retrieve this value and display the selected font size.

Related topics

• Understanding session variables
• Collecting information to store in session variables
• Storing information in session variables
• Retrieving data from session variables