In order to customize the management interface, it is first necessary to understand how the management CGI processes HTTP requests and formulates HTTP responses. This is described in Section 4.3.1 and Section 4.3.2. Following those descriptions, Section 4.3.4 describes the individual commands which can be embedded in those requests.

4.3.1 Processing HTTP Requests

The CGI interface responds to HTTP POST requests by parsing the request for a management command and generating the appropriate response. The content of the POST request is the management command and takes the general form

command=command-name&parameter-name-1=parameter-value-1& ...&parameter-name-N=parameter-value-N

(The above line has been wrapped for typographic reasons.) The ellipses, ... , in the above indicate additional parameter-name=parameter-value pairs which might appear in the command. The allowed command names and associated parameters are described in Section 4.3.4. The commands are case-insensitive: the command and parameter names can be specified in either upper, lower, or mixed case.

If the command cannot be extracted from the request, an HTTP 5yz error response is sent back to the client. If the command can be extracted but cannot be parsed or successfully executed, a successful HTTP 200 response is sent back; the content of the HTTP response will be formatted as per the error formatting directions specified in the management command. If those directions could not be extracted from the command, then an HTTP 500 error response is returned. See Section 4.3.2 for further details.