Sams Teach Yourself CGI in 24 Hours, Second Edition

Handling Many Types of Requests

In the previous section, you saw how you can handle two types of requests with one script. Well, there’s nothing to say you can’t handle any number of different types of requests within the same script. The script just has to be able to determine what it’s supposed to do based on the parameters that are passed in.

The simplest approach here is to use a parameter to specify exactly what action the script is supposed to take. Unsurprisingly, many people have standardized on calling this parameter action in their scripts. For example, let’s say you’re writing a script that enables someone to view a list of records, add records, delete records, and edit records. If you wanted to use the same script for all of those ...