ReturnRaw Context

[ReturnRaw]MIME Headers[/ReturnRaw]

Sends 'raw' MIME header text back to browser.

To get more control over the exact MIME header information sent to the browser, put a [ReturnRaw] context into a template. You can create 'true' URL-redirect pages this way, or us it to force the remote browser to display password dialogs. Probably the most common use for this feature is to create "click-through" statistics on pages where you place advertisements with hyperlinks that lead off of your site. ReturnRaw allows you to insert some WebDNA (to increment a hit counter, for instance) before leading the customer away from your site.

Example (normally you would put the following text into a .tpl file on your server and use a web browser to link to it):

[ReturnRaw]HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Status: 200
Content-type: text/html

<html>
...your HTML here...
</html>[/ReturnRaw]

Try It!

Note: the above example must have <Carriage Return><LineFeed> at the end of each line in order to work. On a PC, simply using NotePad to create the file will put CR/LF in the proper places. On a Macintosh you may use BBEdit or another text editor to set the file type to DOS-style line endings.

For illustration purposes, the example above shows the MIME headers that are automatically created for you whenever you display any normal page from WebCatalog. Of course, since these headers are always created automatically, this example does nothing special -- the real usefulness of this feature comes when you change the MIME headers to do something special, like a URL-redirect.

The following example causes the remote browser to immediately redirect to a different URL. This is better that the META tag that some newer browsers support, because almost all browsers understand the low-level MIME header URL redirect.

[ReturnRaw]HTTP/1.0 302 Found
Location: http://isd.smithmicro.com/

(some WebDNA here that does something interesting)
[/ReturnRaw]

Note: when you put a [ReturnRaw] context into a template, any text outside the [ReturnRaw] container is ignored. So if you want to display some HTML after the raw MIME headers, you must put that HTML inside the context.