title: CakePHP dropping session between pages
body: <p>I have an application with multiple regions and various incoming links. The premise, well it worked before, is that in the app_controller, I break out these incoming links and set them in the session.</p>
  
  <p>So I have a huge <em>beforeFilter()</em> in my <em>app_controller</em> which catches these and sets two variables in the session. Viewing.region and Search.engine, no problem.</p>
  
  <p>The problem arises that the session does not seem to be persistant across page requests. So for example, going to <em>/reviews/write (userReviews/add)</em> should have a session available which was set when the user arrived at the site. Although it seems to have vanished!</p>
  
  <p>It would appear that unless <em>$this->params</em> is caught explicitly in the <em>app_controller</em> and a session variable written, it does not exist on other pages.</p>
  
  <p>So far I have tried, swapping between storing session in 'cake' and 'php' both seem to exhibit the same behaviour. I use 'php' as a default. My <em>Session.timeout</em> is '120', <em>Session.checkAgent</em> is False and <em>Security.level</em> is 'low'. All of which should give enough leniency to the framework to allow sessions the most room to live!</p>
  
  <p>I'm a bit stumped as to why the session seems to be either recreated or blanked when a new page is being requested. I have commented out the <em>requestAction()</em> calls to make sure that isn't confusing the session request object also, which doesn't seem to make a difference.</p>
  
  <p>Any help would be great, as I don't have to have to recode the site to pass all the various variables via parameters in the url, as that would suck, and it's worked before, thus switching on <em>$this->Session->read('Viewing.region')</em> in all my code!</p>