Getting the CGI to determine which page loaded it

[spyderco]

I have a CGI script which is being called from many different pages. I need the CGI script to determine which page just called it.

Say we are at

http://www.mypage.com/page1.shtml

. We are including the CGI script as an SSI. The CGI has to output the URL of page1.shtml.

Just for the sake of it, I also used

<!--#exec cgi="../cgi-bin/stats/downloads.pl"-->

My first idea was using $ENV{"HTTP_REFERER"}. I thought this worked at first but it turns out it only works if the page1.shtml is called directly. This is to say, if you are on

http://www.mypage.com/page2.shtml

and click a link to

http://www.mypage.com/page1.shtml

the CGI included on page1.shtml will say the referer was "

http://www.mypage.com/page2.shtml"

and NOT page1.shtml which it should!

I have used both the SSI and the exec cgi code and using HTTP_REFERER but it's absolutely not working. Can someone tell me how I can get the URL of the page that called it?

 

[ishnid]

The easiest and most reliable way would just be to pass a parameter to the script, like so:

<!--#include virtual="../cgi-bin/stats/downloads.pl?from=page1.shtml"-->

 

[ChrisHunt]

According to

http://www.perlservices.net/cgi-bin/env_vars.pl

, there are environment variables called [tt]$ENV{'DOCUMENT_NAME'}[/tt] and [tt]$ENV{'DOCUMENT_URI'}[/tt] that hold the information you need.

If that doesn't work for you, try writing a little perl program that outputs the names and values of the whole %ENV hash. Call it as an SSI and see what's what!

-- Chris Hunt
Webmaster & Tragedian
Extra Connections Ltd