Bug? Intermittent situation with CGI program

[Sadhunathan Nadesan]

Aloha,

We have identified an intermittent bug situation using MC as a CGI
language which I will submit to the bug list.  Personally I don't read
the bug list emails and I imagine there are others who don't either
but who might like to know of the existence of the situation.

In a nutshell it is that using MC as a CGI to collect data from a form
(which is in turn dynamically generated), it sometimes fails to
collect anything, on some large forms.  It is as if the form on the
web page did a transmit, but, the MC CGI did not do a receive.

I realize that itermittent bugs are very hard to track down.  We can
provide a test situation wherein, in one of our offices (NY) the cgi
always fails on a given form, for certain users running Outlook 2002
or Outlook 2000, and Windows 98, sometimes fails for other users in
this office (same set up), and never fails for other users in our San
Diego office with the same environment.  

This would seem to suggest the environment!  However, when we recode
the same CGI program in Perl, it always works for all users.  HMMMM!!
This might suggest something coded wrong or lacking in the MC program.

In other words, it might not really be a bug in MC.  I'm sending it in
anyway.

The basic scenario is like this:  a program on our main transaction
processing situation collects a series of invoice numbers from the
user.  It then generates an HTML form with a yes or no button for
approval of each invoice, and emails that to the person who is
supposed to approve it.

That person (a customer) insists they have to use Outlook, even if
this problem does not occur on other email clients (the customer is
always right).  They insist it has to work on their Win98 machine in
their NY office.  They are not willing to use a browser to submit the
same forms.

They fill in the yes/no buttons on this form and click submit and the
form calls the cgi back end in MC which in turn emails their response
to the right group and saves the emails in an archive so there is a
historical record of everything.

I am going to include in the next couple emails 3 things,
(since I have to conform to 15k or less per message).

1) a shell script for emailing an html form to someone, however, it
depends on other programs I am not supplying, so  you can basically
ignore this, send the form any way you like.

2) a form which is an example of the kind that are generated with a
list of invoice numbers - useful because it always fails for certain
users.  (other, shorter forms work for them).

3) the back end cgi in MC.

So, bottom line, if anyone has any suggestions to offer, please!

I'd hate to have to conclude that MC is unreliable and everything will
have to be coded in Perl.

Regards,
Sadhu