enctype required??

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

I am running perl 5.8.5 and CGI 3.05 and mod_perl 1.99 on an apache2 server. I seem to have to have my forms include the ENCTYPE="multipart/form-data" tag to work. Below is the test code.

<html>
<head><title>Pay Memo</title>
</head>
<body>
        <form name="testform" method="post" action="step2.asp">
                <input type="hidden" name="id" value="1234"><br>
                <input type="text" name="thedata"><br>
                <input type="submit" name="submit_button" value="Test 
+It">
        </form>
</body>
</html>
[download]

Does not work, but if I put in the ENCTYPE

<html>
<head><title>Pay Memo</title>
</head>
<body>
        <form name="testform" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-da
+ta" action="step2.asp">
                <input type="hidden" name="id" value="1234"><br>
                <input type="text" name="thedata"><br>
                <input type="submit" name="submit_button" value="Test 
+It">
        </form>
</body>
</html>
[download]

it does work. The reading program is this:

<%
use strict;
use CGI;

my $q = new CGI;


my $data = $q->param('thedata');

%><html>
<head><title>Test Script</title>
        <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=is
+o-8859-1">
</head>
<body>
        Got:<%=$data%>
</body>
</html>
[download]

The first example code works fine under mod_perl 1. Any help as to why the ENCTYPE is required now, under mod_perl2, but not under mod_perl 1 would be appreciated. Thanks

Comment on enctype required?? Select or Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: enctype required?? by chas (Priest) on Apr 02, 2005 at 21:23 UTC
Take a look at 442565 and especially the comments by merlyn. (It seems to be a CGI.pm issue.) chas	[reply]
Re^2: enctype required?? by davidg (Initiate) on Apr 02, 2005 at 21:31 UTC
Thanks, but 442565 seems to be referring to HTML code generated by CGI. In my case, the HTML code is a static web page, coded by the WEB front end people. Does the new CGI only read multipart/form-data forms? If so, that means that I would need to have all the front end web pages that have forms changed to add the ENCTYPE tag. Not that that would cause a problem, it's just a lot of work.	[reply]
Re^3: enctype required?? by chas (Priest) on Apr 02, 2005 at 21:41 UTC
Yes, that occurred to me, but I thought maybe the fact that there is a change in CGI.pm involving enctype might be related to your problem. merlyn indicated that "the latest CGI.pm uses multipart/form-data for both start_form and start_multipart_form" so it seemed possible that it might ignore starts omitting that. Unfortunately I don't have the latest version to experiment with. Sorry, chas	[reply]
Re: enctype required?? by ikegami (Patriarch) on Apr 02, 2005 at 22:58 UTC
After looking at the source of the latest CGI (3.07), it looks like 1) CGI understands POST data of type application/x-www-form-urlencoded, and 2) CGI treats POST data as application/x-www-form-urlencoded if no Content-Type is specified by the browser. Can you confirm your browser is omitting the Content-Type header, or that it's set to application/x-www-form-urlencoded? What happens if you set the enctype to application/x-www-form-urlencoded? The issue in 442565 concerns generating forms using CGI and doesn't bear on this problem as far as I saw looking at the source.	[reply]
Re^2: enctype required?? by davidg (Initiate) on Apr 03, 2005 at 00:33 UTC
Thanks, I just tried it with `application/x-www-form-urlencoded` It still behaves the same and does not send the data to the back end. I am running IE6 which should send the default. I tried looking for CGI errors and saving the CGI to a file using the `$q->save(FILEHANDLE)`. Nothing gave me any hints.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: enctype required?? by Errto (Vicar) on Apr 03, 2005 at 00:25 UTC
Based on the code snippet it looks like you might be using Apache::ASP. It's probably not a good idea to use CGI with Apache::ASP together, since you can already get at all the form values through the `$Request` object. Update: The Apache::ASP docs say this isn't true, but I wonder how that works with the recent changes in CGI.pm	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: enctype required?? by davidg (Initiate) on Apr 03, 2005 at 00:58 UTC
You are correct in that I am using Apache::ASP. If I use `$Request->Form('thedata');` to get the data it works. The problem is that I have lots of older code that uses the CGI that was changed into ASP code. The CGI should work in the ASP model. I guess the decision is which would take more time, changing the forms or changing the code....	[reply] [d/l]
Re^3: enctype required?? by Errto (Vicar) on Apr 03, 2005 at 01:11 UTC
What happens if you add `<%=$Request->ServerVariables(CONTENT_TYPE) %>` [download] in your page somewhere (using the first version of your form)?	[reply] [d/l]
Re^4: enctype required?? by davidg (Initiate) on Apr 03, 2005 at 03:18 UTC