Bug? Intermittent situation with CGI program

[Pierre Sahores]

Sadhunathan Nadesan a écrit :
> 
> 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
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Hello Sadhu,

I got the same kind of troubble, tree yahrs ago, before avoiding to use
MC as a direct CGI engine. By starting to use it, in both console and
graphical modes (under linux), as a Web application long running process
server (linked, one side, to the Apache cgi gateway trough a php cgi
script, acting as the MC sockets listener and, second side, to both a
PostgreSQL and a MySQL-Max servers, trough a second php script, directly
builded by a Metatalk script), i never got any bug in using this dual
config and the 10 lines of php are for me the best way to have more than
15.000 lines of great metatalk handling some fine web apps servers 24/24
hours, 7/7 days.

About Apache/PHP/Metacard, all you need is to read back my previous
wrotes in the archives. If needed, i can write about the way i use to
link together Metacard/PHP/PostgreSQL and Metacard/PHP/MySQL. In this
way, MC challengers are no more tools like PHP, Python or Perl but
stuffs like ColdFusion, OmnisStudio or the J2EE Web Apps Servers (alike
WebSphere or WebObjects) and MC is, clearly, the very best of them !!!

(working in production mode under Suse-Linux Intel 6.3/PHP 3.0.15/MC
2.32 to Suse-Linux Intel 8.0/PHP 4.0.6/MC 2.32 and, probably, soon under
MacOSX 1.0.15. - In between, while i'm running Suse-PPC 7.3 under a new
2002 IBook II Combo/DVD, i'm trying to install unsuccessfully yaboot,
nor lilo from within Yast2. Any idea on how to cleanly install the
boot-loader would be greatly apprecied ;-))

Regards, Pierre Sahores

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