Gets the value of an HTTP variable.

Syntax

HTTP_VARIABLE( var-name [ [ , instance ] , http-header-field ] )

Parameters

Remarks

This function returns the value of the named HTTP variable. It is used when processing an HTTP request within a web service.

If a header for the given var-name does not exist, the return value is NULL.

When the web service request is a POST, and the variable data is posted as multipart/form-data, the HTTP server receives HTTP headers for each individual variable. When the http-header-field parameter is specified, the HTTP_VARIABLE function returns the associated multipart/form-data header value from the POST request for the particular variable.

All input data goes through character set translation between the client (for example, a browser) character set, and the character set of the database. However, if @BINARY is specified for http-header-field, the variable input value is returned without going through character set translation. This may be useful when receiving binary data, such as image data, from a client.

This function returns NULL when not called from a web service.

See also

• -xs server option
• Working with variables
• HTTP_DECODE function [HTTP]
• HTTP_ENCODE function [HTTP]
• HTTP_HEADER function [HTTP]
• NEXT_HTTP_HEADER function [HTTP]
• NEXT_HTTP_VARIABLE function [HTTP]
• SQL Anywhere web services
• Web services functions
• Web services system procedures

Standards and compatibility

Examples

The following statements request the Content-Disposition and Content-Type headers of the image variable:

SET v_name = HTTP_VARIABLE( 'image', NULL, 'Content-Disposition' );
SET v_type = HTTP_VARIABLE( 'image', NULL, 'Content-Type' );

The following statement requests the value of the image variable in its current character set, that is, without going through character set translation:

SET v_image = HTTP_VARIABLE( 'image', NULL, '@BINARY' );