Hi Wouter,
The specification is correct in the KVP examples, but other related parts need to be updated. I really hope I can find some time to update the specification during the next days. One of the pending changes will restrict content-type in POST requests to "application/x- www-form-urlencoded" which makes it possible to extract all parameters from raw post data when necessary.
You're right that QUERY_STRING should also be available, but isn't this variable part of the CGI spec? (http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/cgi/env.html) I would be interested to know which web servers don't support this variable so that I can update TapirLink documentation and warn users about the limitation.
A couple of months ago TapirLink was not working with multiple concepts in KVP inventory requests, but now it should work (current code in Subversion, which should soon be part of a new release).
It's a pity that PHP doesn't handle well multiple parameters with the same name without using the square brackets trick. But you can also use the code below to get all parameters correctly.
Hope this helps, -- Renato
// Alternative code to read query parameters in PHP
function _ParseQueryString( ) { $parameters = array();
// See if there is any raw post $raw_post = '';
if ( $fp = fopen('php://input', 'r') ) { while ( $data = fread($fp, 4096) ) { $raw_post .= $data; }
fclose($fp); } else { // raise an error here... }
// Concatenate query string and raw post before splitting $raw_input_items = split('&', $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'].'&'.$raw_post);
foreach ( $raw_input_items as $input_item ) { // split into name/value pair if ( $input_item != '' ) { $item = split('=', $input_item);
$key = urldecode($item[0]);
$value = (empty( $item[1] )) ? '' : urldecode($item[1]);
if ( ! isset($parameters[$key]) ) { $parameters[$key] = $value; } elseif ( ! is_array($parameters[$key]) ) { $first = $parameters[$key]; $parameters[$key] = array(); $parameters[$key][]= $first; $parameters[$key][]= $value; } else { $parameters[$key][]= $value; } } }
return $parameters;
} // end of function _ParseQueryString
On 17 Jul 2007 at 12:11, Wouter Addink wrote:
Hi Donald, It is true that it depends on the processing software, but I think it is not standard behavior and therefore I would not recommend it. It is also implemented differently in Tapirlink. The reason is that Tapirlink uses PHP and inPHP superglobals ($_GET or $_REQUEST)return only he last kvp parameter if there are more with the same name. An alternative could be to get the wholequery stingwith a server variable ($_SERVER[QUERY_STRING])and to parse the parameters with a regex, but that sounds not very attractive to me, as it depends on the used webserver if this variable is available and returned correctly. ----- Original Message ----- From: Donald Hobern To: Wouter Addink Cc: tdwg-tapir@lists.tdwg.org Sent: Tuesday, July 17, 2007 11:54 AM Subject: Re: [tdwg-tapir] error in tapir specification
Surely it depends on how the software processes the parameters. The GBIF data portal has adopted precisely this pattern (no square brackets) to allow users to specify a set of alternative values for many of the filters on the occurrence web search. The JSP receives the parameters fine. Donald Wouter Addink wrote: Hi, I think there is an error in the KVP Inventory examples in the Tapir specification doc. Examples likehttp://example.net/tapir.cgi?op=inventory&concept=http://example.net/s chema1/Country& concept=http://example.net/schema1/Genus cannot be implemented I think, because concept will not be treated as an array here and only the last concept would be returned. this would work: http://example.net/tapir.cgi?op=inventory&concept%5B%5D=http://example.n... /schema1/Country& concept[]=http://example.net/schema1/Genus regards, Wouter Addink