Let us take a look at the settings for the interactions with visitors. There in effect two options available for this interaction – cookies or sessions. Where is the difference between the two? Cookies are minute text files that can be temporarily stored on the visitor's computer whereas the session information is administered on the server side. Both approaches let you ‘track’ the surfer on your own website or carry along additional information of an individual user. Since the visitor may have de-activated cookies for security reasons, sessions are a good alternative.

Actually, sessions are nothing but the 'AFP cookies' of the previous versions. The choice of this term at the time may have been a bit awkward. You need not deposit visitor-related information on the visitor's system through the session management. In addition, if the surfer changes PC or browser in the meantime, the data will be preserved under certain conditions. For this purpose, the session data are centrally stored on the server in the directory %session% and monitored by Session.DBF. For the development of your Web applications you always integrate the SessionID in your linked URLs and FORM ACTION. This will at all times provide you with the current location and status of a visitor to your Web pages.

The configuration page provides both options. In this page you define whether or not cookies or sessions are to be used at all and, if so, what they should be called. You may freely choose a name; do not use special characters as these may cause problems with the character set.

The specification of the session file relates to the administration table of all active sessions; in most cases, it will be stored under the %common% directory. Timeout specifies the maximum life span of each session before it is automatically removed from the administration.