Perl HTML file upload issue. File has zero size - html

I have a perl CGI script, that works, to upload a file from a PC to a Linux server.
It works exactly as intended when I write the call to the CGI in my own HTML form and then execute, but when I put the same call into an existing application, the file is created on the server, but does not get the data, it is size zero.
I have compared environment variables (those I can extract from %ENV) and nothing there looks like a cause. I actually tried changing several of the ENV in my own HTML script, to the values the existing application was using, and this did not reveal the problem.
Nothing in the log gives me a clue, the upload operation thinks it was successful.
The user is the same for both tests. If permissions were an issue, then the file would not even be created on the server.
Results are the same in IE as in Chrome (works from my own HTML script, not from within the application).
What specific set up should I be looking at, to compare?
This is the upload code:
if (open(UPLOADFILE, ">$upload_dir/$fname")) {
binmode UPLOADFILE;
while (<$from_fh>) {
print UPLOADFILE;
}
close UPLOADFILE;
$out_msg = "Done with Upload: upload_dir=$upload_dir fname=$fname";
}
else {
$out_msg = "ERROR opening for upload: upload_dir=$upload_dir filename=$filename";
}
I did verify that
It does NOT enter the while loop, when running from inside the application.
It does enter the while loop, when called from my own HTML script.
The value of $from_fh is the same for both runs.
All values, used in the below block, are exactly the same for both runs.

You could check the error result of your open?
my $err;
open(my $uploadfile, ">", "$upload_dir/$fname") or $err = $!;
if (!$uploadfile) {
my $out_msg = "ERROR opening for upload: upload_dir=$upload_dir filename=$filename: $err";
}
else {
### Stuff
...;
}

My guess, based on the fact you are embedding it in another application, is that all the input has been read already by some functionality that is part of the other application. For example, if I tried to use this program as part of a CGI script, and I had used the param() function from CGI.pm, then the entire file upload would have been read already. So if my own code tried to read the file again, it would receive zero data, because the data would have been ready already.

Related

Extracting the outputs/results from an executed .pexe file

My goal is to convert a C++ program in to a .pexe file in order to execute it later on a remote computer. The .pexe file will contain some mathematical formulas or functions to be calculated on a remote computer, so I’ll be basically using the computational power of the remote computer. For all this I’ll be using the nacl_sdk with the Pepper library and I will be grateful if someone could clarify some things for me:
Is it possible to save the outputs of the executed .pexe file on the remote computer in to a file, if it’s possible then how? Which file formats are supported?
Is it possible to send the outputs of the executed .pexe file on the remote computer automatically to the host computer, if it’s possible then how?
Do I have to install anything for that to work on the remote computer?
Any suggestion will be appreciated.
From what I've tried it seems like you can't capture the stuff that your pexe writes to stdout - it just goes to the stdout of the browser (it took me hours to realize that it does go somewhere - I followed a bad tutorial that had me believe the pexes stdout was going to be posted to the javascript side and was wondering why it "did nothing").
I currently work on porting my stuff to .pexe also, and it turned out to be quite simple, but that has to do with the way I write my programs:
I write my (C++) programs such that all code-parts read inputs only from an std::istream object and write their outputs to some std::ostream object. Then I just pass std::cin and std::cout to the top-level call and can use the program interactively in the shell. But then I can easily swap out the top-level call to use an std::ifstream and std::ofstream to use the program for batch-processing (without pipes from cat and redirecting to files, which can be troublesome under some circumstances).
Since I write my programs like that, I can just implement the message handler like
class foo : public pp::Instance {
... ctor, dtor,...
virtual void HandleMessage(const pp::Var& msg) override {
std::stringstream i, o;
i << msg.AsString();
toplevelCall(i,o);
PostMessage(o.str());
}
};
so the data I get from the browser is put into a stringstream, which the rest of the code can use for inputs. It gets another stringstream where the rest of the code can write its outputs to. And then I just send that output back to the browser. (Downside is you have to wait for the program to finish before you get to see the result - you could derive a class from ostream and have the << operator post to the browser directly... nacl should come with a class that does that - I don't know if it actually does...)
On the html/js side, you can then have a textarea and a pre (which I like to call stdin and stdout ;-) ) and a button which posts the content of the textarea to the pexe - And have an eventhandler that writes the messages from the pexe to the pre like this
<embed id='pnacl' type='application/x-pnacl' src='manifest.nmf' width='0' height='0'/>
<textarea id="stdin">Type your input here...</textarea>
<pre id='stdout' width='80' height='25'></pre>
<script>
var pnacl = document.getElementById('pnacl');
var stdout = document.getElementById('stdout');
var stdin = document.getElementById('stdin');
pnacl.addEventListener('message', function(ev){stdout.textContent += ev.data;});
</script>
<button onclick="pnacl.postMessage(stdin.value);">Submit</button>
Congratulations! Your program now runs in the browser!
I am not through with porting my compilers, but it seems like this would even work for stuff that uses flex & bison (you only have to copy FlexLexer.h to the include directory of the pnacl sdk and ignore the warnings about the "register" storage location specifier :-)
Are you using the .pexe in a browser? That's the usual case.
I recommend using nacl_io to emulate POSIX in the browser (also look at file_io. This will allow you to save files locally, retrieve them, in any format you fancy.
To send the output use the browser's usual capabilities such as XMLHttpRequest. You need PNaCl to talk to JavaScript for this, you may want to look at some of the examples.
A regular web server will do, it really depends on what you're doing.

Understanding JSON-RPC in Perl

I am trying to understand the concept of JSON RPC and it's Perl implementation. Though I can fin d a lot of examples for Python/Java, I find surprisingly little or no examples for it in Perl.
I am following this example but am not sure it is complete. The example I had in mind was to add 2 integers. Now I have a very basic HTML page set up, like so:
<html>
<body>
<input type="text" name="num1"><br>
<input type="text" name="num2"><br>
<button>Add</button>
</body>
</html>
Next, based on the example above, I have 3 files:
test1.pl
# Daemon version
use JSON::RPC::Server::Daemon;
# see documentation at:
# https://metacpan.org/pod/distribution/JSON-RPC/lib/JSON/RPC/Legacy.pm
my $server = JSON::RPC::Server::Daemon->new(LocalPort => 8080);
$server -> dispatch({'/test' => 'myApp'});
$server -> handle();
test2.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl
use JSON::RPC::Client;
my $client = new JSON::RPC::Client;
my $uri = 'http://localhost:8080/test';
my $obj = {
method => 'sum', # or 'MyApp.sum'
params => [10, 20],
};
my $res = $client->call( $uri, $obj );
if($res){
if ($res->is_error) {
print "Error : ", $res->error_message;
} else {
print $res->result;
}
} else {
print $client->status_line;
}
myApp.pl
package myApp;
#optionally, you can also
use base qw(JSON::RPC::Procedure); # for :Public and :Private attributes
sub sum : Public(a:num, b:num) {
my ($s, $obj) = #_;
return $obj->{a} + $obj->{b};
}
1;
While I understand what these files individually do, I am at a complete loss when it comes to combining them and making them work together.
My questions are as follows:
Does the button in the HTML page come inside a tag (like we would normally do in a CGI-based program)? If yes, what file does that call? If no, then how do I pass the values to be added?
What is the order of execution of the 3 Perl files? Which one calls which one? How is the flow of execution?
When I tried to run the perl files from the CLI, i.e using $./test2.pl, I got the following error: Error 301 Moved Permanently. What moved permanently? which file was it trying to access? I tried running the files from withing /var/www/html and /var/www/html/test.
Some help in understanding the nuances of this would really be appreciated. Thanks in advance
Does the button in the HTML page come inside a tag (like we would
*normally do in a CGI-based program)? If yes, what file does that call?*
If no, then how do I pass the values to be added?
HTML has nothing at all to do with JSON-RPC. While the RPC call is done via an HTTP POST request, if you're doing that from the browser, you'll need to use XMLHttpRequest (i.e: AJAX). Unlink an HTML form post the Content-encoding: header will need to be something specific to JSON-RPC (e.g: application/json or similar), and you'll need to encode your form data via JSON.stringify and correctly construct the JSON-RPC "envelope", including the id, jsonrpc, method and params properties.
Rather than doing this by hand you might use a purpose-build JSON-RPC JavaScript client like the jQuery-JSONRP plugin (there are many others) -- although the protocol is so simple that implementations usually are less than 20 lines of code.
From the jQuery-RPC documentation, you'd set up the connection like this:
$.jsonRPC.setup({
endPoint: '/ENDPOINT-ROUTE-GOES-HERE'
});
and you'd call the server-side method like this:
$.jsonRPC.request('sum', {
params: [YOURNUMBERINPUTELEMENT1.value, YOURNUMBERINPUT2.value],
success: function(result) {
/* Do something with the result here */
},
error: function(result) {
/* Result is an RPC 2.0 compatible response object */
}
});
What is the order of execution of the 3 Perl files? Which one calls
*which one? How is the flow of execution?*
You'll likely only need test2.pl for testing. It's an example implementation of a JSON-RPC client. You likely want your client to run in your web-browser (as described above). The client JavaScript will make an HTTP POST request to wherever test1.pl is serving content. (e.g: http://localhost:8080).
Or, if you want to keep your code as HTML<-->CGI, then you'll need to make JSON-RPC client calls from within your Perl CGI server-side code (which seems silly if it's on the same machine).
When test1.pl calls dispatch, the MyApp module will be loaded.
Then, when test1.pl calls handle, the sum function in the MyApp package will be called.
The JSON::RPC::Server module takes care of marshalling from JSON-RPC to perl datastructures and back again around the call to handle. die()ing in sum should result in a JSON-RPC exception being transmitted to the calling client, rather than death of the test1.pl script.
When I tried to run the perl files from the CLI, i.e using
*$./test2.pl, I got the following error: Error 301 Moved Permanently.*
What moved permanently? which file was it trying to access? I tried
*running the files from withing /var/www/html and /var/www/html/test.*
This largely depends the configuration of your machine. There's nothing obvious (in your code) to suggest that a 301 Moved Permanently would be issued in response to a valid JSON-RPC request.

Chrome Console: VM

When executing a script directly in the console in Chrome, I saw this:
Does anyone know what's the meaning of VM117:2
What does VM stand for ?
It is abbreviation of the phrase Virtual Machine.
In the Chrome JavaScript engine (called V8) each script has its own script ID.
Sometimes V8 has no information about the file name of a script, for example in the case of an eval. So devtools uses the text "VM" concatenated with the script ID as a title for these scripts.
Some sites may fetch many pieces of JavaScript code via XHR and eval it. If a developer wants to see the actual script name for these scripts she can use sourceURL. DevTools parses and uses it for titles, mapping etc.
Thanks to #MRB,
I revisited this problem, and found the solution today,
thanks to https://stackoverflow.com/a/63221101/1818089
queueMicrotask (console.log.bind (console, "Look! No source file info..."));
It will group similar elements, so make sure you add a unique identifier to each log line to be able to see all data.
Demonstrated in the following example.
Instead of
data = ["Apple","Mango","Grapes"];
for(i=0;i<10;i++){
queueMicrotask (console.log.bind (console, " info..."+i));
}
use
data = ["Apple","Mango","Grapes"];
for(i=0;i<data.length;i++){
queueMicrotask (console.log.bind (console, " info..."+i));
}
A better way would be to make a console.print function that does so and call it instead of console.log as pointed out in https://stackoverflow.com/a/64444083/1818089
// console.print: console.log without filename/line number
console.print = function (...args) {
queueMicrotask (console.log.bind (console, ...args));
}
Beware of the grouping problem mentioned above.

Importing local json file using d3.json does not work

I try to import a local .json-file using d3.json().
The file filename.json is stored in the same folder as my html file.
Yet the (json)-parameter is null.
d3.json("filename.json", function(json) {
root = json;
root.x0 = h / 2;
root.y0 = 0;});
. . .
}
My code is basically the same as in this d3.js example
If you're running in a browser, you cannot load local files.
But it's fairly easy to run a dev server, on the commandline, simply cd into the directory with your files, then:
python -m SimpleHTTPServer
(or python -m http.server using python 3)
Now in your browser, go to localhost:3000 (or :8000 or whatever is shown on the commandline).
The following used to work in older versions of d3:
var json = {"my": "json"};
d3.json(json, function(json) {
root = json;
root.x0 = h / 2;
root.y0 = 0;
});
In version d3.v5, you should do it as
d3.json("file.json").then(function(data){ console.log(data)});
Similarly, with csv and other file formats.
You can find more details at https://github.com/d3/d3/blob/master/CHANGES.md
Adding to the previous answers it's simpler to use an HTTP server provided by most Linux/ Mac machines (just by having python installed).
Run the following command in the root of your project
python -m SimpleHTTPServer
Then instead of accessing file://.....index.html open your browser on http://localhost:8080 or the port provided by running the server. This way will make the browser fetch all the files in your project without being blocked.
http://bl.ocks.org/eyaler/10586116
Refer to this code, this is reading from a file and creating a graph.
I also had the same problem, but later I figured out that the problem was in the json file I was using(an extra comma). If you are getting null here try printing the error you are getting, like this may be.
d3.json("filename.json", function(error, graph) {
alert(error)
})
This is working in firefox, in chrome somehow its not printing the error.
Loading a local csv or json file with (d3)js is not safe to do. They prevent you from doing it. There are some solutions to get it working though. The following line basically does not work (csv or json) because it is a local import:
d3.csv("path_to_your_csv", function(data) {console.log(data) });
Solution 1:
Disable the security in your browser
Different browsers have different security setting that you can disable. This solution can work and you can load your files. Disabling is however not advisable. It will make you vulnerable for all kind of threads. On the other hand, who is going to use your software if you tell them to manually disable the security?
Disable the security in Chrome:
--disable-web-security
--allow-file-access-from-files
Solution 2:
Load your csv/json file from a website.
This may seem like a weird solution but it will work. It is an easy fix but can be unpractical though. See here for an example. Check out the page-source. This is the idea:
d3.csv("https://path_to_your_csv", function(data) {console.log(data) });
Solution 3:
Start you own browser, with e.g. Python.
Such a browser does not include all kind of security checks. This may be a solution when you experiment with your code on your own machine. In many cases, this may not be the solution when you have users. This example will serve HTTP on port 8888 unless it is already taken:
python -m http.server 8888
python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8888 &
Open the (Chrome) browser address bar and type the underneath. This will open the index.html. In case you have a different name, type the path to that local HTML page.
localhost:8888
Solution 4:
Use local-host and CORS
You may can use local-host and CORS but the approach is not user-friendly coz setting up this, may not be so straightforward.
Solution 5:
Embed your data in the HTML file
I like this solution the most. Instead of loading your csv, you can write a script that embeds your data directly in the html. This will allow users use their favorite browser, and there are no security issues. This solution may not be so elegant because your html file can grow very hard depending on your data but it will work though. See here for an example. Check out the page-source.
Remove this line:
d3.csv("path_to_your_csv", function(data) { })
Replace with this:
var data =
[
$DATA_COMES_HERE$
]
You can't readily read local files, at least not in Chrome, and possibly not in other browsers either.
The simplest workaround is to simply include your JSON data in your script file and then simply get rid of your d3.json call and keep the code in the callback you pass to it.
Your code would then look like this:
json = { ... };
root = json;
root.x0 = h / 2;
root.y0 = 0;
...
I have used this
d3.json("graph.json", function(error, xyz) {
if (error) throw error;
// the rest of my d3 graph code here
}
so you can refer to your json file by using the variable xyz and graph is the name of my local json file
Use resource as local variable
var filename = {x0:0,y0:0};
//you can change different name for the function than json
d3.json = (x,cb)=>cb.call(null,x);
d3.json(filename, function(json) {
root = json;
root.x0 = h / 2;
root.y0 = 0;});
//...
}

C Program for Form Processing

I have no idea how to achieve this, but I have a HTML form, with several different elements in it.
For testing, right now, all I would like to do is write a piece of C code that will take anything that is submitted and print this out on the screen.
I can write my own parsing code - I just cannot work out how to get the form data to print directly to the screen.
Thanks in advance.
Assuming you have a web server configured to allow you to do CGI, your HTML form needs to be written to either GET or POST the form data to the CGI script. You can then implement a CGI script in C to process the form data.
As a starter CGI script, you can simply echo whatever is provided in the input as the output.
int main () {
int c;
puts("Content-type: text/plain");
puts("Connection: close");
puts("");
while ((c = getchar()) != EOF) {
putchar(c);
}
return 0;
}
You need an HTTP server, with settings that let you run CGI scripts. This could be a server installed locally in your computer, using e.g. XAMPP, or it could be a web server that you have access to.
Then you will write a C program that uses CGI conventions for I/O. As output, it should write a complete HTML document with accompanying HTTP headers. You will need to compile the program into an executable, upload the executable on the HTTP server, and put the URL of the executable into the action attribute of the form.
For details etc., check out Getting Started with CGI Programming in C.
Here's an example of a form echoing script in C, which you might find helpful in terms of responding to both GET and POST methods, parsing the query string or input, etc:
http://www.paulgriffiths.net/program/c/formecho.php