[Zope] GET vs. POST

Dennis Allison allison@sumeru.stanford.EDU
Fri, 9 May 2003 14:58:45 -0700 (PDT)


Sorry, Tom, sarcasm does not play well on the list and especially not when
it's taken out of context.

My original question was to find a way to eliminate the display of
information in the browser's address window.  Typically this comes 
from passing information with a URL either by having an actual hyperlink
or through using a redirect and passing parameter with it.

There are Javascript mechanisms which might work but they all require
signed scripts--something my environment can't support.  One could wrap
everything in a unitary frame set and run full screen--possibly the right 
solution eventually but not for the moment.   I'm still pondering this 
problem.

Jamie has suggested that redirection is a bad idea and that I'd be better
off using some other mechanism both for the transfer of control and to
pass variables.  You are suggesting much the same: that an idiom that
explicitly constructs and passes a REQUEST object explicitly may be better
than using the URL parameter mechanism may be a better approach.  I'll 
try that out on a few use cases and see how it plays.  We are currently
beginning to re-engineer and scale-up our system so now's a good time to
do so.


On Fri, 9 May 2003, Passin, Tom wrote:

> [Dennis Allison]
> > 
> > How do you transfer information via post when using
> > REQUEST['RESPONSE'].redirect?
> > 
> > How do you get Zope to use POST as its default rather than GET?
> > 
> 
> Hmm, methinks you do not have a clear idea of how these things work.
> The choice of POST vs GET is not up to Zope per se.  It is up to the
> User Agent, which in practice means it is up to the design of the web
> page itself.  There is no Zope "default".
> 
> If you want to redirect to a new page and pass some information to the
> redirected page while you do so, you would give the information to the
> page template via (typically) REQUEST variables (which you can set
> during Zope processing) - or other Zope variables - so that the DTML or
> ZPT that builds the redirected page can include the data into the page.
> Sometimes the data ends up populating visible or hidden fields in a
> form, sometimes you decide to apply it in other ways.  At this level,
> neither GET nor POST is involved, since it would happen before the page
> is built and sent back to the browser.
> 
> If this is not helpful enough, then give us a few (simplified and clear)
> scenarios tha trouble you, and maybe we can help clarify and simplify.
>