Submit a form over  secure socket ssl and get result
lazarus / 38-Networking and Web Programming

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jack · 2012-08-09 01:24

I need to submit a form to my website and receive the response.

I found synapse and with it an excellent example of simplicity using
httpsend that worked.

Now I would like to move that example to SSl using https.  Not so
fast, there is no httpssend !
So there must be more to it than just finding a new synaps module?

Since I learn best by example.  I have been searching for an example
of code using HTTPS.  Hopefully code as simple as that I found for
httpsend.

Can anyone point me to an example?

I just want to submit a form with half dozen string fields and recieve
the response string.

Yes we do have a cert and yes we can do this from a browser without
problems.

=================================
Here is the example that I have tested and it works without SSL.
========
procedure TForm1.Button1Click(Sender: TObject);
var
   programName  : String;
   date         : String;
   submitString : String;

   resultstream: TStringStream;

begin
   programName  := ExtractFileName(ParamStr(0));
   date         := FormatDateTime('mm/dd/yyyy', now);

   submitString := 'programName=' + programName + '&pcDate='+date;

   resultstream := TStringStream.Create('');
   try
      if httpPostURL('http://mysite.com/directory/index.php',
submitString, resultstream) then
         edit2.text := resultstream.DataString
      else
         edit2.text := 'httpPostURL failed';
   finally
      resultstream.Free;
   end;
end;
=============================

Thank you for your time and I hope you can show me an example.

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ludob · 2012-08-09 06:11

You just add ssl_openssl to the uses clause of the program and
httpsend will also work with https. The reason for this simplicity is
that httpsend is already ssl aware but doesn't have a default ssl
implementation. Synapse supports different ssl implementations with
openssl and cryptlib the best known ones. So you just need to tell
Synapse which implmentation to use. Openssl has the most liberal
licence.

Be sure to have the openssl libraries accessible from the app.

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jack · 2012-08-09 12:44

Going with LAZARUS is looking more and more like a very good decision.
Thanks for the response.

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jack · 2012-08-09 13:05

When testing with the suggested ssl_openssl added to the uses
statement I got a strange reply from somewhere.

If I use a url of http://myserver.com/index.php I get the expected
result.

If I use a url of https://myserver.com/index.php I get "Fix old link".

This response is Not from my php program.

Any thoughts are appreciated.

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ludob · 2012-08-09 15:04

If you didn't change anything else to the code then the message is
coming from your server. How is the server set up? There are different
things that can go wrong. For example the DocumentRoot for the *:443
virtual host could be different from the *:80 virtual host (apache). 
Is connection with a normal browser working and is the url in the
address field of the browser the same as you entered. If it is
different then you have probably a redirection which you have to deal
with. Synapse doesn't do redirections automatically. Another source of
information are the web server logs. 

The disadvantage of convenience functions like httpPostURL is that a
lot of status messages and headers are hidden from you. Creating your
own Httpsend object gives far more flexibility and information.  If
you look at the source code of httpPostURL you'll see immediately what
is involved. Creating your own httpsend object allows also for
connection re-use which is a big performance boost when you have a lot
of interaction with the webserver. https connection setup takes quite
some time.

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jack · 2012-08-09 16:38

Thanks I am off to talk with the server folks.