Question

We have a program which runs either on a live environment or on a test environment. The only difference is that the URL on the test environment contains “/test/”. When in the test environment, some functions cause it to switch to the live environment (when the URL was hard coded!), so I’m trying to fix that.

I have created this function in JavaScript:

function GetTestMode()
{
    // If "/test/" exists in URL, keep it there (we are in test mode).
    var currentURL = document.URL;
    var sTestMode = "";
    if (currentURL.indexOf("/test/") != -1)
    {
    // test mode (according to URL)
      sTestMode = "test/";
    }
    return sTestMode;
}

This is used by the JavaScript functions and works as expected.

However, most of the UI code is in Python (creating HTML). So I want to get this JavaScript result in Python. So far I have:

import cgi
import os
import sys
import re

def DrawUI (self, short=False):
    print '<br />'
    print '<div class="box2">'
    print '<table cellspacing=0 cellpadding=0 border="0">'
    print '<tr>'

    sTestMode = "test mode = %s" % ('<a href="javascript:GetTestMode()" >')
    print 'sTestMode = ' + sTestMode + '<br />'

This causes the print statements following this code (which can even be print 'hello world') to become a link which, if I click on it, displays the correct return value from the JavaScript function in the browser.

How can I get sTestMode to contain the return value (without user interaction)?

Answer 1

I assume you are using mod_python.

Here’s a hacked up example how to get the Javascript variable to the server.

In Python, using the cgi module:

form = cgi.FieldStorage()
sTestMode = form.getfirst('sTestMode')
sTestMode = cgi.escape(sTestMode)  # Avoid script injection escaping the user input

In JavaScript, using JQuery (not sure if this is correct, maybe some JQuery guru can fix this if wrong):

var filename = '/url/to/your/script';
$.ajax({
  url: filename + '?sTestMode=' + sTestMode,
  type: 'GET'
});

If you have problem implementing the Javascript version you can make sure your Python script is correct by calling /url/to/your/script?sTestMode=something_funny in your browser.

However, you should read up the concepts of CGI, Ajax and how mod_python works.