Cookie Path Issue

I’m struggling with something and maybe some fresh eyes/minds could help.

I’m running into a situation where I’m trying to set a site-wide cookie, but I just can’t seem to get it work.

In a nutshell, I’m logging in a user (through a security realm) via siteminder and then creating an Expression Engine session with some extra data in place. After successfully authenticating with siteminder, the user is sent to a page (dashboard/authenticate) which performs some service calls to pull some data, sets a cookie (it has to be a cookie - no go for sessions only), then sends to user to a personalized landing page.

I’ve attempted a multitude of different methods for setting the cookie, from using the built in EE class to just a straight php call (

setcookie("memberData", $authData, time()+3600, "/", ".thisisthedomain.com");

) (thisisthedomain is the real domain, we’re just under a confidentiality agreement). Nothing seems to be working - the cookie is being set, but I can’t get it to target ‘/’ - the cookie is only being set for /dashboard/authenticate.

Does anybody have any ideas as to why this could be happening? Guesses are welcome.

Thanks! Sam

[Mod Edit: Moved to the Development and Programming forum]