.IMPORT CGI DATA

This subroutine populates Appx variables from STDIN.

.IMPORT CGI DATA
- Usage:
- Description:

Usage:

      GOSUB    --- .IMPORT CGI DATA
      *        Test for Error
      IF       --- .IMPORT CGI DATA           NE

Description:

This subroutine populates Appx variables from STDIN. No parameters are required.

This can only be used in Appx sesssions that have been invoked by a web server. Running this in a normal Appx session will cause the session to hang or crash.

APPX understands how to parse CGI data into APPX variables. It picks apart the CGI data string and looks for variable NAMEs that match an APPX variable name and sets the variable accordingly. This acts as a SET statement where the sender is always alpha. So, if you use the ALPHA representation of a DATE field, then when APPX fills the date field from the CGI data, it will do the correct conversion from the ALPHA value.

The format of your CGI NAMEs for variables must match the pattern that APPX understands: AAA:BBBB BBB(CCC)=DDDDDD, where AAA is the Application ID (optional), BBBB BBB(CCC) is the APPX variable (with optional occurrence), and DDDDDD is the value. Optional occurrences should use leading zeroes for a total of 3 characters. If the Application Id is missing, Appx will default to the current application.

The environment variable CONTENT_LENGTH must be set to the size of the text being imported before invoking APPX, else APPX will fail or hang during startup. This is usually set by the web server itself.

Note that you can use this routine as many times a you like in the session, it is not a destructive parse of the incoming STDIN data. For example, you may have one standard application that receives web requests. It can call this routine to determine what to do next, and invoke another Appx process. That Appx process can also call this routine to populate the variables it is interested in, and so on.

To see the details of the processing this subroutine, set the environment variable APPX_CGIDATA_LOG=<filename>.

See document "Using CGI to Interface with the Web" for more detailed information. You may also want to refer to the document "Introduction to Web Server" for the basics of this concept.

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-- JeanNeron - 2012-02-06

Topic revision: r3 - 2020-05-12 - JeanNeron