Form submit gets redirected

[lance_vincent]

Hi guys,

First of all, I wanted to post this under a much more defined category, but this is as relative as I could find.

I have this form that when submitted sometimes automatically redirects to 404. This form has only 2 fields, a title and the article body. The form defaults to application/x-www-form-urlencoded. The log below is taken directly from Live HTTP Headers.

http://www.faulty-domain.com/article-page

POST /article-page HTTP/1.1
Host: www.faulty-domain.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.23) Gecko/20110920 Firefox/3.6.23 ( .NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 115
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://www.faulty-domain.com/article-page
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 3288
blog_title=Article+Title+to+save&newsbody=%3Cp%3EThe+current+blah+blah+blah%3C%2Fp%3E


HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Tue, 08 Nov 2011 12:42:23 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.63 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.0.63 OpenSSL/0.9.8e-fips-rhel5 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 PHP/5.2.14
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.14
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Location: http://www.faulty-domain.com/notFound
Content-Encoding: gzip
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Length: 26
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

As seen above, the page sends to itself, then is suppose to check if the method was post, the usual stuff. But then the http response is a notFound page. Clearly the web server did not even executed our index.php, but decided based on the request headers somehow that the response should be a 404.

Now I've done my own debugging, and played with the article I'm sending. I tried to append the article paragraph by paragraph and see on what paragraph the bug triggers. The form submits fine until a certain paragraph, at that point I said Bingo! I thought I isolated the problem and tried to submit the form using that paragraph alone, but then the form submitted. Which now puzzles me, why would apache accept it as it is, but if appended on the end of the original article, it goes nuts!

Anyone's got any idea? It's probably an htaccess thing, or a web server thing, but I just couldnt get this thing nailed. Any form of help is much appreciated!

[programthis]

Can you post the code for your form as well as your form processor? That might help us to better help you.

[L4DD13]

Can you tell us what the action attribute of the form is as well as the method?
Or, provide a link to the form in question?

Regards,
Michael

[lance_vincent]

Sorry guys for the delayed response.

The form on the html page looks something like this

<form name="editArticleForm" method="POST" action="write-article">

on the form processor (which is also the same page), it looks like this

if($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] == "POST"){
$article = array("blog_title"  => $_POST['blog_title'],
		"blog_text"   => $_POST['blog_text']);
$db->AutoExecute("blog",$article ,"INSERT");
}

The million dollar clue here is that the entry point of our framework, index.php, does not get executed when I submit the form, as seen on the headers information above.

I spent most on my time trying to look into possible htaccess issues here, but what we try to handle there are url patterns. Any other guesses?