Data loss in CGI submissions?

RT Developers
1

Hi,

We have ran into a peculiar problem with RT. When submitting CGI

forms, certain data get lost – for example, when resolving a ticket and
also filling in the ‘time worked’ field, the said field never gets
updated.

I was able to narrow it doen further with RTFM. Specifically, we

have two text-single fields available – Comment and Meta-Comment – and
they work fine, as long as Comment isn’t large. if you have a large
Comment field, Meta-Comment becomes impossible to update (it comes after
Comment): each time you try to update it, it simply doesn’t get updated,
and that’s that. You can however first fill in the Meta-Comment, and
then fill in the large body of text for the Comment, and both values get
retained.

I thought this to be a browser problem, so I tested it under a

few different browsers – IE, Camino, and Safari under OS/X, and Mozilla
1.4 under Linux. While the parameters change (data loss varies depending
on the browser), the data loss nonetheless occurs every time. Sometimes
a large text field will get sliced up in the middle, sometimes simply
text values get lost, but th eoverall trend persists.

We have seen this behavior both under Apache/mod_perl w/ RT

3.0.2, and Apache2/mod_perl2 w/ RT 3.0.6. Could this be related to Mason
argument handling? Does anyone know where this problem comes from, and
how it could be solved?

Thanks,

P.S. I saw mentions on the list of a similar problem, but it was
attributed to RedHat’s mod_perl2; and while we didn’t have RTFM
installed before we moved to mod_perl2, we still saw the loss of ‘time
worked’ field value when resolving tickets. Our previous installation
was hand-built Apache1/mod_perl1, rather than RedHat RPM installation.

| Victor Danilchenko | Of course my password is the same as |
| danilche@cs.umass.edu | my pet’s name. My macaw’s name was |
| CSCF | 5-4231 | Q47pY!3, but I change it every 90 days. |

2

Victor Danilchenko wrote:

Hi,

We have ran into a peculiar problem with RT. When submitting CGI
forms, certain data get lost – for example, when resolving a ticket and
also filling in the ‘time worked’ field, the said field never gets
updated.

Does sound a lot like that problem i was having with truncation of the
form post data through mod_perl, although you mention you are using a
mod_perl 1 as well with this problem (maybe this bug has been in
mod_perl 1 in the past?)

Anyway something worth checking that is reasonably symptomatic of this
truncation thing - try submitting a 100k attachment, see if it gets
chopped off at a silly point - for me they were getting killed after
about 4k-8k and that was all RT/mason was receiving from mod_perl.

Mod_perl 1.28 certainly works ok here, although i’m not having another
issue where word documents are getting corrupted (which is annoying
because i tested many times with a 750 tar gz file hoping that would be
a reaosnable binary simulation :P)

Either way let me know what you find out, it might be relevant to this
word corruption i’m about to go up against ;/

Iain

3

Hi,
We have ran into a peculiar problem with RT. When submitting CGI
forms, certain data get lost – for example, when resolving a ticket and
also filling in the ‘time worked’ field, the said field never gets
updated.

I was able to narrow it doen further with RTFM. Specifically, we

have two text-single fields available – Comment and Meta-Comment – and
they work fine, as long as Comment isn’t large. if you have a large
Comment field, Meta-Comment becomes impossible to update (it comes after
Comment): each time you try to update it, it simply doesn’t get updated,
and that’s that. You can however first fill in the Meta-Comment, and
then fill in the large body of text for the Comment, and both values get
retained.

I thought this to be a browser problem, so I tested it under a

few different browsers – IE, Camino, and Safari under OS/X, and Mozilla
1.4 under Linux. While the parameters change (data loss varies depending
on the browser), the data loss nonetheless occurs every time. Sometimes
a large text field will get sliced up in the middle, sometimes simply
text values get lost, but th eoverall trend persists.

We have seen this behavior both under Apache/mod_perl w/ RT

3.0.2, and Apache2/mod_perl2 w/ RT 3.0.6. Could this be related to Mason
argument handling? Does anyone know where this problem comes from, and
how it could be solved?

Thanks,

| Victor Danilchenko | Of course my password is the same as |
| danilche@cs.umass.edu | my pet’s name. My macaw’s name was |
| CSCF | 5-4231 | Q47pY!3, but I change it every 90 days. |