I would think the current post could be stuffed into the post_error.html 
page (or its replacement) when it's generated, then carried across to 
the login page, and then reposted, so it wouldn't require javascript at 
all. I haven't thought about it too much, though.

It's just a terrible user experience, so it'd be nice to fix it.

Chris


On 2014-07-09 13:10, Mark Montague wrote:
> On 2014-07-09, 15:11, Chris Hecker wrote:
>> I just got burned by this on my own site, losing a forum post that took
>> me a while to write.  How hard would it be to fix this issue, it really
>> sucks to lose the user's (read: my) data.
>
> The easy solution is to use a browser add-on such as Lazarus that will
> recover the data for you when this happens:
> http://getlazarus.com/download   I use this in Firefox and it works well.
>
> Note that this is not an issue with cosign per se, but rather an issue
> with how HTTP redirects work:  The web browser will hold on to the body
> data for the original POST request across multiple redirects, but
> discards it as soon as the ultimate request either succeeds (2xx status)
> or fails (4xx or 5xx status).  The problem is that the user winds up at
> the central weblogin server to reauthenticate, which serves the login
> page to the user (200 status) -- at this point, the browser discards the
> unread POST body data from the original HTTP request.
>
> When I was still working for the central IT organization at the
> University of Michigan, I did some thought experiements on what it might
> take to add a feature to cosign that would preserve POST data across
> reauthentication events.  At the time, I thought it *might* be possible,
> although tricky.  The POST data would have to be grabbed by something at
> the start of the reauthentication event (perhaps by mod_cosign before it
> redirected the user to the central weblogin server?) and saved.  At the
> end of the reauthentication, the original POST request would have to be
> regenerated -- in theory, mod_cosign could dynamically generate a page
> for the user that contained JavaScript that would re-issue the POST
> request.
>
> Some concerns include:
> 1. If JavaScript is needed, the solution would not work with all
> browsers; ideally, things would be designed to degrade gracefully.
> 2. How much POST data should be accepted by cosign and saved?  There are
> potential denial-of-service concerns here, not to mention the time
> required to upload, then download, then upload a large amount of POST
> data especially if the user is on an asymmetrical connection such as DSL
> or cable modem.
> 3. Related to (2) how many POST variables should be supported?
> 4. How long should POST data be held?  5 minutes?  longer? shorter?
> There are potential security concerns here, too, not to mention web
> application timeout concerns for webapps that expect the form to be
> submitted within a certain window.
> 5. There are undoubtedly other concerns too.
>
> This might be a fun experimental project for someone with free time.
>
>

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