Perl
Perl

Perl - Passing cookies received with CGI::Cookie through to and from LWP::UserAgent->Post

I'm running Perl CGI in an Apache environment.

My Perl script calls another page on my domain using LWP::UserAgent->Post. It takes the html that is returned and passes it back (prints it) to my user.

I would like to pass all of the cookies sent to my script on to the page I'm posting to. I'd also like to send back any cookies returned from the page I posted to, back to my user.

The purpose of my script is to add some credentials to the http post data so we can avoid storing them as hidden fields on our web pages.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use CGI;
$q = CGI->new;

use LWP::UserAgent;
$ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;

# how do I copy the cookies passed to this script to the UserAgent so I can pass them to $url?
my $result = $ua->post($url, \%PostData ); 

if ($result->is_success) {
	# how do I copy the cookies returned from $url back to my user?
	print "Content-Type: text/html\n\n";
	print $result->decoded_content;
}

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ou81aswellAsked: 2016-07-27

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LVL 28

FishMongerCommented: 2016-07-28

IMO, you're attempting to use a very convoluted approach to avoid using hidden fields.

I too don't like using hidden fields so, Instead you should be using server side sessions .
CGI::Session
or
Data::Session

On an unrelated note, you should ALWAYS include the warnings and strict pragmas in EVERY perl script and while testing/debugging cgi scripts, you should include the CGI::Carp module..

use strict;
use warnings;
use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser warningsToBrowser);

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ou81aswellAuthor Commented: 2016-07-28

Thanks. This behavior is the recommended approach / best practice for our new payment gateway (Elavon Converge). I'm adding support for this gateway to our shopping cart as our old gateway (bought out by Elavon) is being retired at the end of next month.

From what I can tell, it's pretty new (the recommendation for what they call server side scripting, to be a best practice) as the perl samples they provide gloss over the issues introduced when you call their pages indirectly, like cookies.

I saw something like the following recently:

%cookies = CGI::Cookies->Fetch;

This looks like a way of grabbing all of the cookies passed.

Is there a way to hook that up to the UserAgent->Post call?

Thanks

LVL 28

FishMongerCommented: 2016-07-28

Have you read the $ua->cookie_jar section in the LWP::UserAgent module documentation?

ou81aswellAuthor Commented: 2016-07-28

Bits of it. I was hoping this was a trivial thing that could be accomplished in 2 or 3 lines of code.

LVL 28

FishMongerCommented: 2016-07-28

It probably will end up being a few simple lines of code, but I haven't done any cookie coding through LWP::UserAgent so I would have to do some testing.

The starting point would be to read the documentation in LWP::UserAgent and HTTP::Cookies to learn the required syntax for this task.

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