On Sat, 2003-11-22 at 11:55, Randy Kobes wrote:
Is there something wrong in principle with returning an explicit status of, eg, 200, rather than using the Apache::* constants?
As I understand it, they are two different things. The Apache constants are for telling apache what's going on and do not necessarily correspond to values in HTTP.
Not so much about the constants (since you can use just numbers), but about the values expected to be returned from the handler.
In order to support stacked handlers Apache expects a handler to return one of the special Apache::OK, Apache::DECLINED, Apache::DONE or an HTTP_ code (or its alias, e.g SERVER_ERROR instead of HTTP_INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR). The first two codes ensure the continuation of the request loop, all the rest abort it.
http://perl.apache.org/docs/2.0/user/handlers/http.html#HTTP_Request_Cycle_Phases
We used to have special handling of return codes to guess what the user may have meant, but recently decided to drop any second guessing and always return to Apache whatever the handler has returned. Therefore earlier we were always doing status =~ s/200/0/, now we don't.
Handlers should always return one of the above three codes when everything is OK, returning any other code is an error to Apache, because it'll break the request loop. The internal Apache logic goes as:
if (status = phase1()) { // e.g. header_parser
return status;
}
if (status = phase2()) { // e.g. trans
return status;
}
...
if (status = phaseN()) { // e.g. fixup
return status;
}so only when a handler returns OK or DECLINED will the request loop continue (see the URL above). Any other return code will break the flow at the current phase and no other phase will be executed (besides logging and cleanup phases which always get executed). So for example if you return Apache::DONE at the header_parser phase, no other phases will be executed.
And if you return Apache::HTTP_OK, in response handler it's essentially an error too. If people feel really strong about it, we can put back the special case for Apache::HTTP_OK. Though if you think about it, it makes your life much simpler is you remember that all you have to return in OK or DECLINED to continue and anything else will abort the normal loop. I hope you will agree with me.
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