In trying to develop a simple perl CGI script, I have run into some kind of caching problem which is making development an absolute nightmare.
The script displays a form (using WWW::Form). On submition, it calls itself. If all the fields have been filled out correctly then the user gets redirected to an appropriate page. If the user has made errors the the form will be displayed again with the error messages. The problem arises when I am using a subroutine. Whilst developing the subroutine, I (obviously) make errors in the code! I try the script out in the browser and get an error message, as you would expect. So then I revert the code back to what it was when it was working... try it in the browser again just to check, and I get an error message once again... strange, I just reverted the code back to what it was when I knew it was working.! Sometimes, if I click refresh several times, it may suddenly decide to start working again. I can force it to work properly again by renaming the subroutine! Another way I can force it to start working again is to restart apache! When the code is in such a state that I know for a fact it should be working, and the browser is giveing me an error... I can run the script successfully from the command line!!! I also notice that if I fill out the form, purposefully making an error (just to test it) I get the error message as you would expect. But then when I correct the error and resubmit the form, I still get the error message. Again, if I resubmit the form several times (sometimes as many as 20 times) it will eventually send the form with the corrected data, and the validation passes. And similarly, if I stop and start apache and then resubmit the form the new data will be passed back and validation will pass. I thought this must be to do with browser caching... As, on submission, the browser seems to send the form back to the server with the old values in it. But surely, even If the browser has cached the page, when I alter the value in one of the input boxes it shouldn't send back the form with the old data!!! Thats crazy. I have tried sending all sorts of headers to the browser to stop it caching the page but nothing has made a difference. So perhaps the problem is not in the browser, but in apache somewhere?? anyone ever had this (or a similar) problem????!! -- Tom David Kirkpatrick Virus Bulletin Web Developer, Virus Bulletin Tel: +44 1235 555139 Web: www.virusbtn.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response>
