Re: HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error

[Scott Klement <sk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sender: Scott Klement <sk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

> I am receiving the HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error  with the
> http_url_post_xml(). Any suggestions on where to look for an answer?

HTTPAPI is an HTTP client.  It connects to HTTP servers and issues 
commands to them.

When something goes wrong on the server (usually program that it calls is 
crashing or otherwise ending abnormally) the server will report "500 
Internal Server Error"

So the question becomes, what's going wrong on the server that's causing 
it to crash?

   a) Are you sending something incorrect?  A well-written server
       shouldn't just crash because you sent it invalid data, instead
       it should tell you what you did wrong.  However, there are a lot
       of servers out there that aren't well written.

   b) Is there a bug in HTTPAPI that may be causing IT to send something
       incorrect?

   c) Is everything you're sending correct, but there's just a bug in
       the server code?

It's awfully hard to narrow something like this down when all you know is 
that some kind of error occurred on the server.  It sure would be easier 
if we knew what the error was, instead of just "an error occurred".

One thing in your code that did make me raise an eyebrow was that you're 
telling the server that your document is encoded with UTF-8.  It sure 
doesn't look like UTF-8 to me!  It looks like EBCDIC data in an RPG 
variable.  Granted, it won't be EBCDIC when it hits the server, since 
HTTPAPI will translate it, but it won't be UTF-8 either.  It'll probably 
be ISO-8859-1.

I don't know if that has anything to do with the error or not.

If you can't figure it out by trial and error, you'll probably have to 
contact the server's admin and see if he can give you more info about 
what's going wrong.

Usually, when an internal server error is sent to the HTTP client, the 
server will also make a log with more detail about what went wrong.  The 
server's admin should be able to look at that log and provide you with 
more more info.
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