A cgi file retrieving

This lists all the constants together on a Ctrl-J. It also eliminates programming errors by providing compiler and IntelliSense validation, yet does not preclude you from entering your own strings. In other words, "Hello, World! Because the CGI application is started by the service, it may not be able to access network shares. Be aware that CGI runs as a service, which communicates with the server.

Therefore, visual interface forms, controls, and message boxes are completely meaningless. As a matter of fact, a message box will cause a CGI application to stop responding.

Error handling should be conducted throughout a CGI code in Visual Basic, so that the default error message box is not be displayed. You can either log error messages on the server or write them to the user's browser.

Visual C debuggers can debug applications written in Visual Basic. Therefore, you can use the CGI debugging techniques referenced below.

The page and the encoded information are separated by the? The GET method is the defualt method to pass information from browser to web server and it produces a long string that appears in your browser's Location:box.

Never use the GET method if you have password or other sensitive information to pass to the server. The GET method has size limtation: only characters can be in a request string.

Here is the actual output of the above form, You enter First and Last Name and then click submit button to see the result.

This packages the information in exactly the same way as GET methods, but instead of sending it as a text string after a? This message comes into the CGI script in the form of the standard input. HTTP protocol is a stateless protocol.

But for a commercial website it is required to maintain session information among different pages. For example one user registration ends after completing many pages. But how to maintain user's session information across all the web pages. In many situations, using cookies is the most efficient method of remembering and tracking preferences, purchases, commissions, and other information required for better visitor experience or site statistics.

Your server sends some data to the visitor's browser in the form of a cookie. The browser may accept the cookie. If it does, it is stored as a plain text record on the visitor's hard drive. Now, when the visitor arrives at another page on your site, the cookie is available for retrieval. If this is blank, the cookie will expire when the visitor quits the browser. This may be blank if you want to retrieve the cookie from any directory or page.

If this field is blank, no such restriction exists. This is very easy to send cookies to browser. Assuming you want to set UserID and Password as cookies. From this example you must have understood how to set cookies. Here it is optional to set cookies attributes like Expires, Domain, and Path. All field values will appear as one long string. Here, FavColor and FavFood would be the names of two input fields from the form, and Black and Twinkies would be what the user entered in those fields.

Once parsed, it's usually convenient to store the input parameters in either an array of strings, or a long string of values. You would probably also want a function that searches the stored parameters to retrieve their values. Once the input is received and parsed, you now proceed to do whatever the CGI was intended to do. But, you must output in a specific format. The most common format, is HTML text. But, the program can also output an image, sound, or any other file type that a browser will recognize.

For the remainder of this document, I will describe the HTML format, since it is by far the most common an exception being access counters, which often output an image. In C, this would be accomplished with:. You can insert anything you want between the start and end codes. Basically, that's it. Output whatever you want as HTML tags. One important note is that some servers put a time-out period on programs, so they don't become a 'run away' process. Normally, if your program doesn't complete it's task, and output it's data in 10 seconds, it will be terminated by the server, and an error message returned by the server.

Don't forget that even error messages from the program, must appear in the format described above. The routines all work, to the best of my knowledge, and if you find a bug, I'll do my best to fix it. There's no charge for using the routines, no end-user copyright notice, it's really free. All I ask, is that you not removed my name and copyright notice from the source code.

Basically, MGCGI contains routines for loading form input values, making them easily accessible, and simplifies the creation of response forms. It contains debugging abilities that permit you to use debug files for input and output, so you can test programs without putting them on a web site.