Re: deleting a file after loading

[cephas]

Are you trying to spit out the image data straight onto the html page along with the html content? If so that would explain the problem of having the ASCII data showing up. What should work is if you generate your dynamic html, and then have an image tag that looks like:

<image src="/cgi-bin/imagegenerator.cgi">

What should be happening is, the browser will make a request to your html generating cgi, then it will start making separate requests for each image it needs, and call your image generating cgi.....

cephas

[belize]

This is the exact problem I am having. But then, the image being generated is based on a search of a database, so that if I reference an external CGI, I have to pass the results of the search, and this I am having trouble doing.

So, I decided to use a subroutine to generate a file, display the file, then delete the file.

Part of my program does call the remote CGI when a single record is returned and it is easy to pass the variables for a single image to be drawn.

If you go to http://www.belizeexplorer.com right now, click on search, and choose Mayan Sites in the Category box, you will see the ASCII come back. Then if you click on the individual links, you will see the program work when it draws a single record.

I think I will have to go back to creating an image, then deleting them after a period of time.

Thanks for your post.

Tony

[Fastolfe]

What if your search assigned an ID number to each visitor, and you used that ID number with a CGI image generation script to either pull their search terms, or simply retrieve a pre-built image associated with that ID?

# in the parent CGI script
my $id = get_user_id;          # just give them a new ID
build_image($id, @arguments);  # or store the arguments
                               # in a database or something

print "<img src='/cgi-bin/fetch_image?$id'>\n";

# or you can be cool and use CGI PATH_INFO stuff:

print "<img src='/cgi-bin/fetch_image.cgi/$id.gif'>";

Then either build the image from the stored information, or retrieve a temp file that matches the ID and send the resulting image, removing the file when it's done.