I would like to request your comments on potential changes to
$Response->{Status}. These potential changes are great enough,
that they might warrant starting a 3.x Apache::ASP release series
because the behavior is so different.THE ISSUE
The problem currently is that one cannot set an irregular HTTP Status
line like "404 Not Found Today", where a developer should be able
to use $Response->{Status} to do so. The problem is that the
$Response->{Status} was being used just to return this status code
to the mod_perl handler phase, say in the case of 404, in which case
Apache would just serve up the 404 ErrorDocument.The problem I have discovered is that setting a custom status_line() in mod_perl contradicts returning a status code in the handler phase. One cannot send custom httpd headers & serve up the Apache ErrorDocument cleanly, its one or the other.
THE FIX
The fix to this is to handle the status/status_line settings internal
to Apache::ASP, and send back an OK to the Apache handler phase, so that
ErrorDocuments are not triggered for any $Response->{Status}. So that
means that while before if you set$Response->{Status} = 404;
to trigger an Apache ErrorDocument, that would no longer work. What would happen instead is that Apache::ASP would output the 404 error document body itself as usual for 200 Status. The nice thing is that we can now output document bodies for any Status code we chose to set and not worry about the Apache ErrorDocument being used instead. So one could have a script like:
<% $Response->{Status} = "404 Gone Today"; %>
Gone today !!and the output would just be "Gone today!!" in the browser.
The only exception to this would be to Status = 500 being set, in which case this would fall back to the Apache ErrorDocument, as its an "internal server error" and is likely to be a script or code that generated a compile time or runtime execution anyway.
My biggest concern is that this will probably break some peoples error handling as it will currently function, but I believe it is important to rationalize the way in which Apache::ASP handles custom Status codes being set at runtime, giving the developer greater control of the response cycle.
So I would propose therefore that this goes into an Apache::ASP 3.x release series, so that people would understand that there might be some things that need to be fixed during such a major upgrade.
Note, that use of ErrorDocuments would still work outside of Apache::ASP
handling a request, for example if a script /path/to/script is not found,
Apache would still serve up the 404 ErrorDocument. The diffference is when
the $Response->{Status} is generated internally in an Apache::ASP script,
and this will likely not affect many developers anyway in how they current
do things.Regards,
Josh
________________________________________________________________ Josh Chamas, Founder phone:925-552-0128 Chamas Enterprises Inc. http://www.chamas.com NodeWorks Link Checker http://www.nodeworks.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
