[11105] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Tricky Form/POST problem
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Chris)
Fri Feb 13 02:49:08 1998
Date: Fri, 13 Feb 1998 02:22:17 -0500
From: Chris <chris@surewould.com>
Reply-To: chris@surewould.com
To: www-talk@w3.org
Resent-From: www-talk@w3.org
Hi!
I have some Java code that POSTs to a form. Here's what it gets back:
Content-Length: 93
HTTP/1.0 302 Redirect
Server: Microsoft-IIS/3.0
Date: Fri, 13 Feb 1998 06:49:31 GMT
Location: /&Time=3607
Set-Cookie: UserID=255493046; path=/;
What looks interesting and scary to me is the 302 Redirect, and the
Cookie. 2 questions:
1) When I do the redirect, do I repost the data, or just go there? And
where is it redirecting me? I assume I go to the file mentioned in the
Location attribute; but is that relative to the host, of the previous
URL?
2) About the cookie - I can't find anything in RFC 1945 (HTTP 1.0)
about cookies. Since I noticed that when I submit the form from
Netscape (instead of Java), Netscape says HTTP/1.0 in the POST command,
and the server says HTTP/1.0 back (see the snippet above), so there's
not any 1.1 stuff going on. That implies that cookies are some
non-standard HTTP/1.0 extension or the like, and that I have zero docs
on them. What do I do? How do I use it?
My suspicion is that I don't repost the form data - I think that the
server acknowledges my login, creates a cookie to create a 'session',
and then if I go to that 302 Redirection with this new cookie (hmmm,
kind of cloak 'n' dagger, wouldn't you say?) that I'll be right where I
want to be. I'm pretty comforatble with that conjecture, But I could
sure use some expert opinion.
Thanks,
Chris
