persistent links

bailey

I want to provide a link onto a particular page on a site, however if you click on the link you are forced to log onto the site with your username and password and then brought to your logged in home-page not the original requested page.

Once logged in if you click on the original link you will be brought straight to the requested page, is there any way to set up the link so that it will always bring you to the right page - whether you have to log on or not

nahdoic

If you don't have control over this site in question then no, unless they were really weak on the security of the website.

bailey

If I did have control what could be done?>?

nahdoic

Lots of things.

You could change the login process to detect the page that the login error came from. So you could set up to redirect back to that page immediately as soon as they logged in.

You could change the login process so you could pass the login details as part of the string ?username=whatever&password=nasfdas

not particularly secure.

You could change the site to allow for an automatic guest login.

But it doesn't sound like you do have control over the site?

bailey

I have control in terms of specing out what needs to be done - I just wanted to know what was involved in this

thanks for your help

[CrimsonGhost]

Well assuming you're writing to code to process the username/password and validate then then something along the lines of....

In PERL
print("Location: <insertLocationToGoTo>\n\n");

In PHP
Header("Location: <insertLocationToGoTo>");

If you using some other CGI type scripting language you'll should be able to do similar. I'm sure you get the idea though.

NOTE: if you have sent any html at all then you are no longer able to send headers. Ensure that if you are redirection that that is pretty much the first thing you send, unless you are sending any other specific headers like set-cookie or whatever.