Re: _REQUEST and variable_order

Stanislav Malyshev wrote: > Hi! > > This topic was already discussed here but never arrived to a conclusion, > so I will raise it again. > The Problem: > We have $_REQUEST superglobal, which is often used to abstract GET/POST > requests. However, in most cases we do not want GET/POST variables to > mean the same as cookie and environment variables. We can avoid that by > setting variables_order to 'GP' but then we lose _SERVER and _COOKIES > which still can be very much useful. We cannot also reliably use > something like 'CGP' since while it won't allow cookies to override > GET/POST we still have no way of not accepting cookie that has no > matching GET/POST. I think this should be cleaned up so that _REQUEST > behavior would conform its use case. > > The proposal(s): > 1. One way to fix it is to create a new .ini request_order that would > control just _REQUEST. > > 2. Other solution would be to keep variables_order but drop 'C' parsing > from _REQUEST - i.e. make _REQUEST never include cookies. I don't know > how many people really need cookies together with get/post in REQUEST. > > 3. Yet another solution would be to make superglobals independent of > variables_order - i.e. _COOKIE would always exist even if > variables_order doesn't have the letter. I actually don't see any reason > having JIT to remove any of the superglobals - if you don't use them, > with JIT you don't pay for them. And with COOKIES it's not that it would > be a big cost anyway - how many cookies could you have? > Of course, it'd be more substantial change which could break some apps > relying on some quirks of current behavior. > > So, what do you think on this? They are all about equivalent. Even #3 would need some sort of ini override since otherwise it removes some flexibility we have today. There are setups that specifically rely on disabling $_COOKIE to force code to go through other mechanisms to get at the cookies. Perhaps a combination of 1 and 2. By default drop cookies from $_REQUEST but have an ini override for the few cases where the app actually relies on this behaviour. I have seen multi-page forms where instead of bouncing previous inputs along in hidden fields it gets transmitted in cookies and they use $_REQUEST to keep track of all of the responses. -Rasmus