[archive] Using CGI & external-form

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 05 September 2005]

I have created a web page A on site A to enter inquiry information. After clicking the send-button, a cgi-script is started on server B which starts a cobol program on server B. This program collects the information. The information should be presented on a page on site C.

This all worked well in a prototype environment on my Windows development machine. Now I installed the several components on the servers and communication is going through the Internet, I get an output form in which the %%variables are visible, but no inquiry data.

I reread the documentation several times, did some tracing to a log file and searched on the Acucorp website and forum, but I still have not solved it. The inquiry of data seems to succeed, the cgi variables are filled with data, but they do not show up on the web page.

Any ideas or suggestions??

Thanks in advance,

Ren

FYI: After a couple of days struggling with this subject, I found out that what I want is not possible. The third step is one too many. The runtime will not merge the data into the webpage coming from server C.

This is what I got from Support:
"The runtime, upon seeing a http url, sends a "location" header in the output stream. The local web server, upon seeing this header, sends a full http response, with the location header and a 302 status code. The 302 means "permanently moved" in http protocol, and causes the browser to start over with a new request to the url indicated in the location header."

When running on Windows with IIS an alternative approach to get this working, could be to include the variable data into the URL line (i.e. "?contractnummer=04041987&contractdatum=24-08-04&debiteurnummer=2418"). This should be possible with ASP pages with use of the REQUEST() function. I did not look further into this because we are (of course!) running Linux.

I'm now forced to move a small part of the webside residing on server C to server B. From a maintenance point this is not attractive, but technically it is maybe even better.

Ren