Xapian discuss - Jan 2007 - Omega behaves differently

I don't understand what's going on with omega.  I have a cgi script that
is calling omega using the back tics, such as
`/usr/local/lib/omega/bin/omega FMT=mail.xml DB=/current DEFAULTOP=and 
P=search`
But omega is ignoring all the parameters.  I get back an html file and
it says it can't open database default.  I temporarily changed the omega
call to an echo to make sure perl wasn't stripping the parameters, and
it isn't.  Now if I copy/paste that line into a terminal window, it
works fine.  The database and template files are readable by everyone,
as is the omega.conf file.

I did a strace on omega being run from perl and I see that the
parameters are passed.  I also set an environment variable to point it
to a different omega.conf file and I see that it read that file correctly.

Any ideas as to why this is not working as expected?

Jim.

Jim wrote:
> I don't understand what's going on with omega.  I have a cgi script
that
> is calling omega using the back tics, such as
> `/usr/local/lib/omega/bin/omega FMT=mail.xml DB=/current DEFAULTOP=and 
> P=search`
Omega can take input from the standard CGI environment variables, or 
from the command line, or from standard input.  However, if CGI 
variables are set (as they will be since you're calling omega from 
within a CGI script), the CGI variables take precedence.

If you want to force omega to ignore these CGI variables, you can 
currently do this by unsetting the "REQUEST_METHOD" environment 
variable.  It will then pay attention to command line parameters if 
there are any, or listen for arguments on stdin if there are no command 
line parameters.

You could, of course, just set all the CGI variables yourself, instead 
of passing the parameters on the command line - but you'd have to be 
careful to clear any other CGI variables to avoid passing values through 
directly from (ab)users of your script.  So, forcing it to just use the 
command line parameters is probably the best plan.

 > Any ideas as to why this is not working as expected?

As I understand it, the command line and stdin methods of controlling 
omega were really written for debugging purposes, which is why they 
don't take precedence in the presence of CGI environment variables. 
That said, I can't really see why you shouldn't use them in the way 
you're doing.

See omega.cc, around line 107 (or search for "REQUEST_METHOD"), for
the
code that works out where to get the parameters from.

-- 
Richard