Re: CGI emailer that doesn't interrupt browsing

Ah, I found what I want. My page still didn't work, but I got the CGI
to work without reloading the page! :-)

Where the CGI changes the window location to a new page, or where it
outputs a success message in HTML or plain text, 
instead have the CGI output the following:

print "Content-type: text/plain \n";
print "Status: 204 \n\n";
exit (0);

Yes, CGIs must return something to the browser. This "No Response"
message successfully ends the browser-CGI interaction without loading a
different page or anything.

FYI.

--- Complex <complex_hwg(at)yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> 	I am shopping for a simple CGI. I found one, and tried to modify it
> slightly, and ran into this problem...
> 
> 	I want a small form to send its contents to the CGI. I want the CGI
> to
> email that information to me. Meanwhile, the form should use
> JavaScript
> to send the user to the next page. My problem is that even this
> simple
> CGI is trying to output a sucess page to the user. When I
> commented-out
> the lines responsible for the success page, an error-message page
> ("500
> Configuration error" or somesuch) appeared. Ugh!
> 
> 	Previously, we'd used a Perl script that emailed the form results to
> us and then sent the user to the success page. The problem with that
> was when our ISP began having some sort of slow-down problems, the
> Perl
> script began behaving sporadically, and some users were blocked from
> accessing the success page. I'm not concerned, at the moment, with
> fixing the ISP problem; I'm concerned with removing the user's
> dependence on our CGI working.
> 
> 	I want the user to be able to access the destination page whether
> the
> CGI succeeds or not. If the CGI fails, we won't get the information,
> but that's okay.
> 
> 	All that said, here's my problem. I am playing with James Marshall's
> mailer.pl (http://www.jmarshall.com/easy/cgi), which is so
> well-commented that I can understand what it does (I don't actually
> program Perl). I commented out the part that writes the success page,
> and while the script continues to email the results to me, the
> browser
> displays an error message.
> 	Now I read in builder.com's Intro to CGI programming
> (http://www.builder.com/Programming/CGI/ss04a.html) that the CGI
> **must** return something to the browser! Is that true? To quote,
> they
> say,
> 
> "Whenever a user invokes a program, the browser keeps the connection
> open, waiting for some kind of response. All of your CGI scripts need
> to send something back to the browser."
> 
> URk!  Is it true that my modified mailer.pl must return something to
> the browser? If so, how can I make it something other than an HTML
> page? I did succeed in outputting a JavaScript file meant to display
> an
> Alert, but :-) that resulted in the browser downloading an actual
> JavaScript file! Cool, IMO, but not what I wanted. I want the form to
> send the user to the desired page, whether or not the Perl script
> works, and I don't want the Perl script to further interrupt that
> progress.
> 
> Many thanks for your help! This is eating up far too much time.
> complex
> 
> =====
> Michael Greisman
> Webmaster
> Scanalytics, Inc.
> 
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
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=====
Michael Greisman
Webmaster
Scanalytics, Inc.

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