sybperl-l Archive

From: Tim Holt <holt at roguewave dot com>
Subject: Sybperl in a fork'ed process?
Date: May 20 1998 4:27PM

Greetings all...

I need a little group confirmation of my theory here...

BACKGROUND
I've got a process (a CGI script) which establishes a connection to a
DB, does some initial processing & DB access to give proper feedback to
the page viewer.  It also has to do some subsequent SQL to update some
records.  I don't want to make the web user wait for the subsequent
processing to take place, so I fork off a process.

QUESTION
What's the state of a connection that's been forked?  Here's a code
sample.  Sybperl is "under" a module I use.
   
   # --- Initialize the connection, get customer info from id
   &Sql::initialize("mydb", "dbfoo", "user", "passwd");
   &Sql::getrow ("mydb", "customer", "*", "WHERE id=$cid", \%customer);
   print "Howdy $customer{name}!
\n";
   
   # --- We're all done now w/customer info for the CGI.  Now
   # --- spawn of a process to do further work that involves no
   # --- output to the person viewing this CGI script.
   unless ($pid=fork()) {
      # --- Call sproc to record sales incident
      $sproc = "eRWWebAppendSalesIncident";
	$params{"IncidentId"} = $lastIncident;
	# --- This should be the protected page that they're about to go
$params{"Item"} = "\"".$ENV{"SCRIPT_NAME"}.$ENV{"PATH_INFO"}."\""; 
	&Sql::getsproc ($dbname, $sproc, %params, \%out);
	&Sql::results($dbname);
   }


I seem to get odd errors (like "DBPROCESS is dead or not enabled")
SOMETIMES (not always) inside the fork'ed code.  So, here's a refined
question:  can I depend on the db connection (the $dbh that's maintained
by my Sql module) to be around?  Won't the first process that quits
terminate the connection and leave the second one in an undefined state?
I know that Sybperl drops the connection when the $dbh goes out of
scope, but is this the same thing?

Thanks for your input on this vexing problem.

Tim Holt, (one of the) Webmaster(s)
Rogue Wave Software