ShopSite Knowledgebase

Some CGIs work and others do not. How can I test form posting on my server? (get.cgi and post.cgi)

Product: SC
Version: 5.0 and earlier
Platform: Unix

I'm having trouble running some ShopSite CGIs while others work without a problem. If I suspect it may be problems with form posting on my server. How can I confirm this?

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Solution ID: S05291

Form submittal is a widely accepted and standardized method of CGI processing on the Web. It allows information to be passed from CGI to CGI.
Most ShopSite CGIs use the POST method for submitting forms. Occasionally, problems with form submittal may masquerade as a ShopSite problem. If you find you're able to access ShopSite (start.cgi) and the initial Pages (pages.cgi) and Products (products.cgi) screens, but have problems when trying to use the "Add a Product" feature or when trying to "View Images" in the Images (mediam.cgi) screen, you may have a problem with form submittal.

Two files were created to isolate issues specific to the server's method of processing forms rather than a problem with ShopSite. On the ShopSite.com ftp site under the perl directory are two scripts, "get.cgi" and "post.cgi". These are perl scripts that will output a page similar to what you would see with info.cgi (which ships with ShopSite). These are very simple perl scripts that do no calculations, only submit back to themselves using the two form submit methods. To use:

1. Download these two files from the partners/utilities/ directory of the support.shopsite.com partners FTP site (if you are an end user that doesn't have access information for this site, please have your ShopSite reseller download it for you) in ASCII mode and place in your store's ShopSite CGI Directory (this directory is usually named 'ss' or 'bo') (see also solution S03714 and S04593).
2. Adjust ownership and permissions to be consistent with the other files in the ss directory.
3. Check that the perl path in the first lines of each file is correct for your server. Edit the line with a text editor as needed.

You should then be able to run the scripts from your browser, replacing the "start.cgi" from the ShopSite access URL with "get.cgi" and "post.cgi". If get.cgi successfully displays the page again after selecting "Submit Get" and post.cgi does not when "Submit Post" is selected, there is a form posting problem on your server. Consult your server documentation to troubleshoot further.

NOTE: Downloading these files to an NT server and transferring to a Unix server may add carriage returns that will interfere with how the scripts will run. To avoid this, ftp directly from the server that will be using these scripts. It is also helpful to confirm that the filesize of the scripts on your server (after you have used ftp to download) matches the size of the files as posted on the support.shopsite.com FTP server.

Related solutions: S02409, S02524, S03794, S02415, S02545

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Solution ID: S05291

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