Hello,

You can use wa CGI, but the Query String need to be well formed.
You can create a simple HTML form, and call the "escape" function from
JavaScript before send the form to wa.

By.


-----Mensaje original-----
De: Warhurst, SI (Spencer) [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Enviado el: martes, 05 de febrero de 2002 12:46
Para: [log in to unmask]
Asunto: Renaming lists & header updates via script


Hi

I've kind of been down this road before, but wondered if anyone out there
has since also been down this route too & might have some useful feedback.

At the moment, when I rename a list, I use a script I wrote in Perl which
follows the guidelines in the Site Manager's manual. I want to revise the
script, since it is an old one when I was first learning Perl, and one of
the aspects that bothers me is updating the headers.

At that stage of the process, I have two list headers I need to send to
Listserv. One is the old header, with the new-list= redirector line in it,
and the other is the new list header. I currently use Blat and email the
headers to Listserv. However, this is not a terribly efficient process.
Firstly, it's not very easy to trap errors from an external program like
Blat, so I don't. I get Blat to send me a copy of what it's sending to
Listserv, manually check it's formed OK, and then wait for Listserv itself
to send the "list header successfully replaced" message, so that I know it's
worked.

The are a couple of main problems with that:
a) The process is not fully automatic, because of the need to manually check
the emails, rather than the script reporting back that it's successfully
updated the header.
b) For some reason, the gap between sending the new header to Listserv &
receiving the successful reply can be as much as 20 minutes. This, I
suspect, is partly that at one stage of the renaming process one has to stop
Listserv, add something to the site.catalog, and then restart Listserv.
Since our server has >4000 lists on it and is very active, it takes Listserv
quite a while to settle back down after a restart and therefore emails are
delayed. This is not ideal though, as that's 10-20 minutes of waiting &
wondering if it's updated the header successfully or not.
c) To check if it's worked, one has to have access to my email account, so
it's always me who has to rename lists ;) (I could allow an email address to
be specified on the command line, so that our helpline could set off the
process, but it's all a bit messy)

So, how do you other site administrators rename lists? I've looked at that
Rexx script and the developers guide, but I don't know Rexx & it doesn't
look very straight forward either. Nor do I know anything about system-level
programming (ie: sockets & stuff like that). I could possibly send the
update command to wa.exe, and in fact one of my other scripts for creating
new lists does that. However, I had problems sending certain characters in
the URLs query string and had to work around it in a bit of a messy way. Any
ideas?

--
Spencer Warhurst
Listserv Service Manager