> I have an NCSA httpd server running on my machine
> I would like to know if there is a way for the server, to identify a given
> "session" in Mosaic. Something that would be similar to the username-password
> authentication
> scheme that exists under Mosaic ,in a given session you are only once asked t
> he password,username
> for a given directory. This could be used for instance, to ask only once in
> a "Mosaic session"
> some information to the user.
A couple approaches that I've seen used are:
1) Make each document an automatically-generated FORM,
and embed the session id in an <INPUT TYPE=HIDDEN>.
2) Embed the session id in the URL as a prefix, and use only
relative URLs in all the served documents. The initial
URL might be something like:
http://www.foocom.com/cgi-bin/session/
and all subsequent URLs would look like:
http://www.foocom.com/cgi-bin/session/ID001942/Top.html
Another approach, which I'm going to try sometime, is to:
3) have httpd fork, allocate a new TCP port, and listen for requests
on that port in "standalone" mode for the lifetime of the session:
http://www.foocom.com:9021/Top.html
Again, all local URLs in served documents must be relative,
so the browser uses the right HTTP port number for
subsequent requests.
None of these schemes are directly supported by NCSA httpd;
you'll need to write some CGI scripts or hack the server in
each case. (2) seems like the easiest way to go.
--Joe English
jenglish@crl.com