Re: Setting a cookie and redirecting

On Tuesday, July 2, 2002, at 11:10 PM, Justin French wrote:

on 03/07/02 11:54 AM, Richard Lynch (rich@phpbootcamp.com) wrote:

Rule of Thumb: If you have to do header("Location: ...") you have a design/engineering/organizational problem in your code/pages/site. I'm sure a zillion people will disagree with this "rule"

I agree, except there's one exception to this that I can't see a way around. When dealing with form submissions the receiving file needs to validate all the code before anything is sent to the browser, update the database (or whatever) and then redirect to itself with some sort of GET flag that issues a thankyou note or something. Otherwise people can hit "refresh" and post the data twice, or 10 times :)

Justin! That's a great idea. No one ever mentioned that to me before (and I've been on and off this list for months). Or actually, I think YOU mentioned it once but I didn't understand it. So let me ask: do you have one giant script that validates all data, depending on the variables sent to it? Or do you have a "formcheck" script for each individual form? This is a great way to stop someone from hitting refresh and resubmitting their POST data accidentally, since you've got that GET flag which basically says "do not process this form!" It's not -secure-, since anyone can remove this flag (even if you used POST), but it will work for Joe User to stop him from accidentally resubmitting. Erik ---- Erik Price Web Developer Temp Media Lab, H.H. Brown pricee@hhbrown.com