Forum OpenACS Q&A: Why does ecommerce add its own Cookie?

Why does the ecommerce module of OpenACS 3 use its own session table and its own cookie (user_session_id)?

The only reason for this that I can see is that using the usca_p parameter enables it to specifically deal with clients that have cookies switched off - telling them something like "please turn on cookies otherwise your shopping cart won't work" as soon as they try to add something to their cart.

I am currently using the session mechanism of ecommerce on my site but would like to rewrite it to use the standard session mechanism of OpenACS - are there any other features of the ecommerce version besides the one mentioned above that the core session management lacks?
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Posted by Eve Andersson on
I would guess that the reason is purely historical: ACS ecommerce user
sessions were created long before there were any general ACS user
sessions, and this got passed on to OpenACS.

The ecommerce version of user sessions doesn't do anything special
beyond the usca_p thing.