User Authentication

[taylan]

Hi Gurus,
I have been working on my site pas few weeks almost 12 hrs a day. I came to a point and got stuck. I am hoping somebody can show me the way. What I want to do is: If a new user is visiting my page, I want to register his/her name,last name, userid and password. If already registered I would like to authenticate them so as soon as they type their userid and password, it will take them to their custome page. Well from tutorials and readings, I got to a point that. I can register them and it returns "registartion successful" page to them and it writes the info into my database. But when they login with a userid and password, it just returns "You are looged in" page. or "Passowrd/userid dont match" page. How can I make this authentication to direct them to the pages I want? I am using php,mysql and FrontPage to do all these. Please somebody help me. I am so frustrated. Thank you

[jensenat]

Hi, I am not sure if I understood you completely, but If I did, I think it is no difficult, I dont have frontpage experience, but since you are using php here is something that might help

This is the way you can do a redirection with php - I did not put all the code because you said you passed the point of authentication.

// Create Query to verify user and password
$Query = "select * from user where username=\"$Username\" and password=password(\"$Password\")";

$DBConnect = create the database connection here.

//Get a result file
$Result = mysql_query($Query,$DBConnect) or die('MySQL Query failed: ' . mysql_error());

// If we have a record means we found a user/password match - I assume usernames are unique, so that is why I am using the == 1
if (mysql_num_rows($Result) == 1) {
$url="http://myserver.com/ExistingUserPage.php";
} else {
$url="http://myserver.com/NewUserPage.php";
}

echo '<META HTTP-EQUIV=Refresh CONTENT="0; URL='.$url.'">';


Hope this help

[taylan]

I will try this. Thank you for your response.

[taylan]

Hi Jen,
Thank you again for your previous response, I tried to put it in the following script of mine but didnt work. As soon as it authenticates the user, it still stays at the authentication page instead of directing to a new page. Can you see whats wrong below?

$request = "SELECT * FROM users WHERE password='".$pass."' AND username='".$user."'";

//Pass the request to the mysql connection,
//and the data is returned in a blob and
//saved in $results
$results = mysql_query($request,$conn);


//if mysql returns any number of rows great than 0, we know we had a match,
//right?
if(mysql_num_rows($results))//function returns true if any matches are found
{
$_SESSION['user'] = $user;
$_SESSION['auth'] = true;
$url="http://myserver.com/redirected.php";

}
else
{
echo "User Name/Password Pair Not Found.";
$_SESSION['auth'] = false;
}


//End PHP file authenticate.php
?>

[jensenat]

Hello if you dont want to redirect the user to an error page if is not a valid user then the only thing you are missing is the redirection after you defined $url

if(mysql_num_rows($results))//function returns true if any matches are found
{
$_SESSION['user'] = $user;
$_SESSION['auth'] = true;
$url="http://myserver.com/redirected.php";
echo '<META HTTP-EQUIV=Refresh CONTENT="0; URL='.$url.'">';
}

That should do it, now, about your if statment, usernames must be unique, so I will expect the result set to have only one record, if more than one records are found something might be wrong with the query, the database or the request, so I suggest you to do a explicit if statement in which you verify that your query returns only one record.

[taylan]

That worked perfectly. Thanks again. You are the man...