Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I have a Perl script that is an action page for a Cold Fusion form where it that takes Cold Fusion parameters and passes them to my script for mailing then passes the parameters to a Cold Fusion action page. Everything works great but was wondering if I can hide the url parameters that show in the url on my redirect: 
#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use CGI qw(:standard); #Perl web CGI module
use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser);
    
my $query = new CGI;
my $name = $query->param("name") || "";
my $city = $query->param("city") || "";

#do perl mail stuff here
#etc......

#now pass parameters here
print $query->redirect("http://webserverhere/mydirectory/act.cfm?name=
+$name&city=$city");

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Here is how the url looks in the browser on my Cold Fusion action page after a form is submitted with 'Name' value of Richard and 'City' value of Atlanta. Can I hide those values so they dont show in the url??? 
http://webserverhere/mydirectory/act.cfm?name=Richard&city=Atlanta

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Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Hiding passed values in url
by matija (Priest) on Mar 22, 2004 at 15:34 UTC
    To hide the parameters you would have to do a POST request.

    There are two problems with that:

    1. The CF script would have to support POST.
    2. You can't do a POST redirect with any reliability. There are some browsers for which it works, but for most it doesn't.
    If you absolutely need to do this, you should use LWP::UserAgent, make a POST request, and then print it's result. The only drawback is that your CF script will see all the requests coming from the server running your script - that may or may not be a problem, depending on your application.
[reply]
      I am looking into the UserAgent module and here is my attempt but it doenst seem to be working. 
      use strict;
use CGI qw(:standard);
use LWP::UserAgent;
use HTTP::Request::Common;

my $query = new CGI;
my $name = $query->param("name") || "";
my $city = $query->param("city") || "";

#do perl mail stuff here
#etc......

$ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
$ua->request(POST 'http://webserverhere/mydirectory/act.cfm', [name =>
+ $name, city => $city]);
#not sure what do to from here?

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[reply]
[d/l]
        You are throwing away the result of the request. You should do something like:
        $result=$ua->request(POST 'http:....
if ($result->is_success) { # Everything OK
   print $result->content; # send everything to the user
} else { # There was an error in the CF script
   die "or do something equaly drastic";
}

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[reply]
[d/l]

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