form data going astray

[Michael Boudreau <mb...@press.uchicago.edu>]

I'm having a recurring problem with an embperl application that makes 
heavy use of HTML forms.

(I have two different configurations that both have this problem: 
apache 1.3.26 with embperl 1.3.6, and apache 1.3.9 with embperl 1.2b11.)

The problem is that sometimes when a user clicks a button to submit 
form data, the values in the form are apparently not sent back to the 
server. The result is that the user sees either an error message or the 
application's entry page (because the application doesn't find form 
data that indicates what it should do).

 From what I can tell, the browser is succesfully contacting the URL in 
the "action" attribute of the <FORM> element, but none of the form data 
seems to be received. The embperl log doesn't show any error message, 
just a call to the application page with no "[xxxxx]FORM: name=value" 
entries, as if the user had come in at the starting page.

I have seen this problem in two different applications, one which uses 
individual HTML pages with unique names (e.g., page1.epl, page2.epl, 
etc.), and one which uses a frameset which contains a frame that has an 
Execute statement that executes a different chunk of embperl depending 
on the "nav_choice" (navigation choice) value submitted.

I think the problem occurs only with <FORM> elements; I can't recall 
whether it has been reported when a user clicks a link containing a 
query string (the application uses both).

The last few reports of this problem have all come from people using 
Netscape Navigator 4.7x, and I don't know if that's a coincidence or 
not. I think the problem has occurred with other browsers, but I don't 
have figures to show how often.

Does this sound like a familiar problem to anybody? If you build a 
web-based application, do you have to accept that a certain percentage 
of button clicks by users are simply going to fail?

Where would you look further to find the cause of this? Would you 
suspect that the browser is not correctly sending the form data (out of 
my control, as long as my HTML is valid), or the data is sent but 
somehow not reaching our web server (also out of my control), or the 
data reaches our web server but somehow embperl loses it?

ANY suggestions or advice would be most gratefully received.


Michael R. Boudreau
Senior Electronic Publishing Developer
The University of Chicago Press
1427 E. 60th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
773-753-3298


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Re: form data going astray

[Gerald Richter <ri...@ecos.de>]

>
> The problem is that sometimes when a user clicks a button to submit
> form data, the values in the form are apparently not sent back to the
> server. The result is that the user sees either an error message or
> the application's entry page (because the application doesn't find
> form data that indicates what it should do).
>....
> The last few reports of this problem have all come from people using
> Netscape Navigator 4.7x, and I don't know if that's a coincidence or
> not. I think the problem has occurred with other browsers, but I don't
> have figures to show how often.
>

This is not a familar problem and you need not to accept it. This should
also work with NS 4.71. Maybe you have some HTML code that the old Netscape
doesn't like.

Can you create a short form, with just an input field and a submit button
that shows this behaviour?

Gerald


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