Setting cookie and Redirecting requests...

[simran]

Hi All, 

What i am trying to do is: 

* If a user goes to http://myhost/[A-Za-z]{3}[0-9]{3}
  (eg. http://myhost/abc123)

  Then i want to redirect them to "/" and set their cookie based on 
  where they tried to go (eg. set cookie Referer=abc123)

To do the above, i setup the following apache configuration:

  <LocationMatch "^/[A-Za-z][A-Za-z][A-Za-z][0-9][0-9][0-9]">
      PerlFixupHandler MyModule::Handlers::setCookie
      PerlHandler      MyModule::Handlers::setCookie
  </LocationMatch>

The relevant perl code is: 

------------------------------------------------------------------------
sub setCookie {
  my $request = instance Apache::Request(shift);

  if ($request->current_callback eq "PerlFixupHandler") {
      warn "PerlFixupHandler...\n";
      return DECLINED;
  }

  warn "PerlHandler...\n";

  if ($request->uri =~ m!^/([A-Za-z]{3}[0-9]{3})!) {
      $request->header_out("Set-Cookie", "Referer=$1");
      $request->content_type('text/html');
      my $server_and_port = $ENV{'HTTP_HOST'};

      $request->send_http_header();
      $request->print("<meta http-equiv=Refresh CONTENT=\"0; 
URL=http://$server_and_port/\";>");
      return OK;
  }
  else {
      return DECLINED;
  }
}
------------------------------------------------------------------------


What happens is that if the relevant directory exists in the document
root (eg. if the directory abc123 existed) then all would work, else, i
get a "Not Found" error. 

How do i make it so that the directory does not need to exist... 

I have put in the above PerlFixupHandler stuff above to try to do this
via returning a DECLINED or even changing the $request->filename(...) to
a filename that exists on my 
system (eg. $request->filename("/etc/hosts")) but it does not work. 

Any suggestions on how to make the above work, or even how to do the
above (set a cookie and redirect the user) in a much neater way would be
appreciated. 

I am using:

  * Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) mod_gzip/1.3.19.2a mod_ssl/2.8.14 OpenSSL/0.9.6c DAV/1.0.3 
mod_perl/1.28

thanks,

simran.