[Mapserver-dev] HTTP Post Handling

Thu Feb 12 23:52:06 EST 2004

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The relevant RFC states that:

For compatibility with HTTP/1.0 applications, HTTP/1.1 requests 
containing a message-body MUST include a valid Content-Length header 
field unless the server is known to be HTTP/1.1 compliant. If a request 
contains a message-body and a Content-Length is not given, the server 
SHOULD respond with 400 (bad request) if it cannot determine the length 
of the message, or with 411 (length required) if it wishes to insist on 
receiving a valid Content-Length.

IMHO, this means that if mapserv is served by a HTTP 1.1 compliant 
server there is no requirement for the client to set the Content-Length 
and thus thus code in cgiutils.c :

   cl = atoi(getenv("CONTENT_LENGTH"));

    if(strcmp(request->contenttype, "application/x-www-form-urlencoded")) {

      request->postrequest = (char *)malloc(sizeof(char)*cl+1);
      if (fread(request->postrequest, 1, cl, stdin) < cl){
        printf("Content-type: text/html%c%c",10,10);
        printf("POST body is short\n");
        exit(1);
      }

is at fault. At the very least it should throw a 411 exception, but it 
would be better to make it more robust.

RA

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<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
 <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1">
 <title></title>
</head>
<body>
 
The relevant RFC states that: 
 
For compatibility with HTTP/1.0 applications, HTTP/1.1 requests containing
a message-body MUST include a valid Content-Length header field unless the
server is known to be HTTP/1.1 compliant. If a request contains a message-body
and a Content-Length is not given, the server SHOULD respond with 400 (bad
request) if it cannot determine the length of the message, or with 411 (length
required) if it wishes to insist on receiving a valid Content-Length. 
 
IMHO, this means that if mapserv is served by a HTTP 1.1 compliant server
there is no requirement for the client to set the Content-Length and thus
thus code in cgiutils.c : 
 
&nbsp;&nbsp; cl = atoi(getenv("CONTENT_LENGTH")); 
 
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; if(strcmp(request-&gt;contenttype, "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"))
{ 
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; request-&gt;postrequest = (char *)malloc(sizeof(char)*cl+1); 
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; if (fread(request-&gt;postrequest, 1, cl, stdin) &lt; cl){ 
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; printf("Content-type: text/html%c%c",10,10); 
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; printf("POST body is short\n"); 
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; exit(1); 
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; } 
&nbsp; 
is at fault. At the very least it should throw a 411 exception, but it would
be better to make it more robust. 
 
RA 
 
 
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