Writing Apache Modules with Perl and C

10.7. Server Core Routines

We now turn to less frequently used calls that are part of the Apache C-language API. These calls allow you to create custom error handlers, to create and manipulate subrequests, and to write formatted error messages to the log file.

10.7.1. The Subrequest API and Internal Redirects

The subrequest API can be used to ask Apache "what if" questions. A subrequest acts just like an ordinary request, except that the response phase is never actually run. The earlier phases, including the URI translation handler and the MIME type checker, are run as usual, and you can use their output to do such things as translating URIs into filenames.

A special case of a subrequest is an internal redirect, in which the current content handler discontinues processing the currently requested URI and tells Apache to return a different local URI instead. The content handler that eventually gets run is not necessarily the same as the one that invoked the internal redirect, although you can arrange for this to happen with ap_internal_redirect_handler().

These routines are declared in the header file http_request.h.

int ap_is_initial_req (request_rec *r)

This function returns a true value if the current request is the initial one. It will return false for handlers invoked as the result of subrequests or internal redirects.

if(!ap_is_initial_req(r)) {
   return DECLINED;
}

The Perl API provides a method called is_main() which returns true for initial requests and for requests ...