Question

Based on this question I asked earlier on setting up cookies in Perl, I successfully got an answer and way to do this but am now faced with a new interesting challenge.

In Perl CGI scripts, it demands you setup a cookie on the header statement which ought to be the first statement in your script. To clarify, you need to have a CGI->header() statement at the top of your script for the CGI script to work!

My scenario:

I have a login screen with a user name and password, upon successful login I need to setup a cookie with the current user name, then redirect the user to another form that checks if the cookie is set before allowing any transactions.

Please note if I set the cookie after the CGI->header() statement, it never get set, and if I set it at the top of my script, it has a bogus value for obvious reasons (user has not logged in)

How do I achieve this? does the CGI->header() statement need to be at the top of my script always?

Gath

Answer 1

Your assertion is wrong: print CGI->header can appear anywhere in your script. However, headers must be output once and only once and before any other output is emitted.

For your purposes, I would recommend using CGI::Application along with CGI::Session (via CGI::Application::Plugin::Session).