Re: Problems with Location: URI and CGI

[email protected]
Thu, 6 Oct 94 07:54 PDT


David Crossley writes:
> We are building a WWW application that calls consecutive CGI server scripts
> before sending the results back to the client. We have one script that
> handles the FORM which then calls another script which handles a call to
> WAIS.
>
> A problem that I have been grappling with for a while now is how to call
> the second script. We have successfully done this using "Location: URI".
>
> However long, complex queries such as that shown here get truncated after
> 255 (?) characters.
>
> Location: http://kaos.erin.gov.au/cgi-bin/SFgate?database=kaos.erin.gov.au:4500/new-sp-multi-erin&maxhits=40&tie=and&theme=MARINE&wbndgcoord+<+148.5+and+wbndgcoord+>+144.5+and+ebndgcoord+<+148.5+and+ebndgcoord+>+144.5+and+nbndgcoord+<+-39.0+and+nbndgcoord+>+-44.0+and+sbndgcoord+<+-39.0+and+sbndgcoord+>+-44.0
>
> So my question is...
>
> Is there a better way to call consecutive CGI scripts to avoid this problem
> or is there something that I am missing?

this is a problem with the NCSA server - it truncates MIME headers to
MAX_STRING_LEN which defaults to 256. This is defined in httpd.h

Quick ugly hack to make it work - up the value of MAX_STRING_LEN. Real
solution: make ncsa httpd able to handle real RFC822 headers (arbitrary
length, multi-line, etc).

-Bill P.