[Http-webtest-general] Redirects and Headers (cookies / POST)

[William M. <wi...@kn...>]

Well, it turns out that redirection requests that preserve header info
(e.g., POSTs, cookies, etc.) are a bit of a mess[1]. There does not seem to
be any clear consensus on whether or not clients should[2] or should
not[3] support preserving the headers on a redirect.

Apparently LWP has sided on the latter option and does not resend
headers on a redirect. The newsgroups have several examples of debug
output that seem to point to this same conclusion so I'll spare ya'll
the gory details. What results when a page that sets a cookie redirects
to another page without sending the cookie (e.g., a login page),
duplicate cookies are created.

One suggestion is to use an intermediary page with a meta refresh
tag[2]. Since I'm using Perl to develop my web application, I was able
to avoid the need to generate this extra page and instead was able to
call the necessary subroutine that displayed the desired page upon a
successful login.

Thanks again for your prompt assistance in helping me debug my
situation. HTTP::WebTest is fantastic.

William

[1] http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/www/post-redirect.html
[2] http://archives.real-time.com/rte-tomcat/2000/May/msg01599.html
[3] http://www.west-wind.com/wckb/redirectsandcookiesandsessions.htm

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