[WEB400] Re: CGIDEV2 strange happenings

[Mel Rothman <mel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi, Michael.

If a CGI program running in a named activation group or its caller's activation 
group "blows up" in a way that doesn't destroy its activation group, any HTML 
that has been buffered in the CGISRVPGM2 service program but not sent will 
still be in the the service program's buffer the next time any program in that 
activation group in that BCI job is run.

A good way to prevent this problem (credit Brad Stone) is in each CGI program 
to execute the ClrHtmlBuffer subprocedure before writing anything into the 
buffer.

If your programs follow my templates, when they fail, they do so gracefully, 
passing control to a program status subroutine that writes information about 
the failure into the debugging file, tries to send a message to the browser, 
and returns.

ClrHtmlBuffer is a relatively new subprocedure and wasn't included in the 
template programs.  Additionally, when Brad recommended using ClrHtmlBuffer in 
every CGI program, I contended that it was not necessary.  Now, it seems like a 
good idea.

I hope this helps.

--
Mel Rothman, CGIDEV2 Author
Mel Rothman, Inc.

http://www.easy400.ibm.it/en

Michael Skvarenina wrote:
>
> We have about 50 RPG CGI programs.  Occasionally an RPG program will blow up
> and the next user to hit the server gets HTML from the program in error
> rather than what they expected.  This can be bad because they may be using a
> billing application for example, click a link to see a balance, and instead
> get a screen showing the VPs salary.
>
> We don't fully understand the technicalities of how RPG programs are
> "called" via the HTTP server but we suspect that when a program blows up,
> it's memory isn't initialized within the instance it was running in, and the
> next incoming request on that instance returns the bogus HTML.
>
> Any ideas?
>