CGI images not appearing

I am in the process of translferring a standalone CGI script into a new workflow, using a cgitask to execute it. This CGI script references images that should exist in a /img directory off of the docroot (<img src="/img/a.gif" ...). The HTML pages that reference these images are displayed via the HTML::Template module. I can get the HTML to display just fine, however the images do not appear. When I look at the file properties of the images, it shows they are in http://servername/img/a.gif and if I plug that URL for the image directly as the URL of the browser (IE) it displays the TeamSite login page http://servername/iw/webdesk/login/img/a.gif. There is obviously some redirection happening, but for the life of us we can't figure out where or why this is happening. The docroot for CGI is set to /interwoven/iw-home/iw-webd/htdocs. We put the img directory in there. We also noticed that if we just put the servername in as the URL (http://servername) we also get the TeamSite login page. This is way over my head. Where do I even begin to debug this?

Dave Smith
Sr. Software Engineer
Nike, Inc.
(503) 671-4238
DavidH.Smith@nike.com

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Johnny

Seems to be real tricky to use the IWOV apache directly.
There are a heap of mod_rewrite entries that redirect everything that comes through.
If you are getting the login screen, and you are already logged in, check that your URL is the same as your TeamSite window.

IE... the cookies are based on the domain, so a short domain or a full domain are different.

http://server/iw is different to
http://server.domain

When you log in to that page, does the image come up?...
I stick to /iw-home/httpd/iw-bin
and put my images under /iw-home/httpd/iw/somedir
Theres alot less to worry about, and no need to hack the mod_rewrite entries.
Im probably just babbling on about nothing, you probably already know this stuff

Good luck

John Cuiuli
Consultant
Sydney, Australia

Migrateduser

Actually I don't know this stuff - I'm not an expert at CGI - I just copy stuff and rewrite my own - I don't use any outside images or anything - all boring stuff. This is someone else's CGI that we're trying to shove into a workflow. It has all knids of fancy stuff in it, including lots of images. When I run the CGI, the $ENV{DOCUMENT_ROOT} is set to /interwoven/iw-home/iw-webd/htdocs. So that's where the templates go and that's the only place where they will display from. Since these HTML templates reference the images relatively (/img/a.gif) it seems like they would have to live under the docroot as well. Doesn't it? I tried putting them under .../iw-home/httpd but that didn't work either. The error log for the web server isn't giving us anything useful. When I run the thing from the workflow and I right click on the empty image and choose Show Picture it does nothing. Where if I run the CGI dorectly from the browser and do the same thing, it goes to the TeamSite login page. It's so frustrating. I can't believe no one else has run into this. Aaaaargh.

Dave Smith
Sr. Software Engineer
Nike, Inc.
(503) 671-4238
DavidH.Smith@nike.com

Migrateduser

By the way, when I log in after it displays the login page, it does not then show the image when I log in. It says page not found.

Dave Smith
Sr. Software Engineer
Nike, Inc.
(503) 671-4238
DavidH.Smith@nike.com

Adam Stoller

If you want to see what's going on - you'll have to stop the iwproxy process and run iwproxy in debug mode (redirect into a file).

As indicated though - I don't believe you should be trying to make this CGI script work off of TeamSite's iw-webd - but rather you should be making it work off of the "customer" web server (which may or may not be Apache too).

I don't recall you saying - but where did you locate this CGI program?
How are you accessing it?
Where did HTML::Template come from?
- Is it something you added to the existing directories that iwperl searches for?
- Is it something you added an explicit reference to from another directory?
- Is the CGI being run with a different version of Perl than iwperl?

--fish
(Interwoven Senior Technical Consultant)

Migrateduser

It's a long story, but in a nutshell this script was written by our IT developers as a standalone web interface for code developers to deploy their code to production. The reason it was written as opposed to using TeamSite from the start is a story best told over a beer. So next time you're in Portland, we can discuss that.

Anyway, they finally decided that they want to use TeamSite instead to deploy code. The UI is fairly complex to get lots of input from the user prior to deployment. Again, I won't go into detail why there needs to be a complex UI - there just does. The UI these folks developed is a perl CGI and it is a very very nice looking UI. Much nicer than I could put together. So we decided to try and just integrate the CGI UI portion of their application into a cgitask in a workflow. That's where I am today.

They use a standard perl module called HTML::Templates to display HTML template files that contain the basic text and form data for each page and the page headers and footers, etc. I can get the HTML page to display with the form data, but any images - the part that makes the page so pretty - do not appear. I get the standard red x instead.

The reason I'm using iw-webd as the placeholder for the HTML templates is because the original developers reference the location of the templates by using the $ENV{DOCUMENT_ROOT} variable. When you display the value of this variable in a cgitask script, it is set to the iw-webd area. The template files only display if they live in this area. Naturally, we would expect the images to live in this path as well, but that doesn't seem to work.

The actual cgi script that the cgitask is calling is where all the other CGI scripts are: .../iw-home/httpd/iw-bin.

The CGI script is running iwperl.

There is apparently some redirection happening that we (Wally and myself) don't have the expertise to understand. Our IT resources are limited. If I don't use the iw-webd path (DOCUMENT_ROOT), then how and where should I reference the HTML templates? Would that make the images appear without dealing with trying to understand the rewrite.conf.template voodoo? This is so frustrating.

I'd be happy to email you the code (I don't want to post it here) - let me know in a private message or email me directly at work if you'd like to take a look at it.

Dave Smith
Sr. Software Engineer
Nike, Inc.
(503) 671-4238
DavidH.Smith@nike.com

Migrateduser

Simply by a stroke of luck, I happened upon a solution that made the images appear. I have no explanation as to why it works - it just does and that's good enough for me. For what it's worth here's what I did:

I moved the images to /interwoven/iw-home/httpd/iw/img and then modified the HTML template for one image from:

<img src="/img/1d.gif" ...

to

<img src="/iw/img/1d.gif" ...

And that made the image appear. Evidently when the HTML attempts to display an image, it does not use the same docroot as the one used to display the HTML template files. Bizarre. But it works. Once I modified all the image references the same way they all appeared. Moving on to the next problem...

Dave Smith
Sr. Software Engineer
Nike, Inc.
(503) 671-4238
DavidH.Smith@nike.com

Adam Stoller

My guess is you'd have to look at the httpd.conf.template and setup an explicit alias for /img to pick them up from the original location (there's already an alias setup for /iw) - my guess is that the document root changes somewhere along the way and that's why the images can not be found off the same document root that the templates were found in.

This is all off the top-o-my-head as I don't have time to play with it right now.

--fish
(Interwoven Senior Technical Consultant)

Migrateduser

To avoid messing so much with iw-home, you could change the image links to include an http://someserver:someport/ prefix, and put the images on that server. Much the same way that people's pictures are viewable in these forums.