Problems when deleting files via the web interface

I have written several procedures that receive a file from 'outside' (eg purchase orders), perform whatever is necessary with the file (such as creating a customer order from the purchase order) and then delete the file. Of course this works fine with the Windows client, but with the web client, the file was not being deleted.

It took some time to figure out what was causing the problem, and as usual, when the cause was known, the solution was not far behind. Let's assume that a procedure has a parameter :$.NAM that will contain the name (and path) of the file to be handled. In the Windows client, that parameter would maintain its value and could be passed to the deletion command with no change. But this wasn't happening in the web interface.

When I ran the procedure under the debugger, I could see where the problem. Let's assume that the name of the file is 'R:\1.txt'. What does the debugger show?

:TEST.TEST.NAM = 'c:/tmp/tekwebsrv4f54z1784033580yc6/p2143200363.TXT';

The name of the procedure is TEST_TEST and as far as the debugger is concerned, :$.NAM becomes expanded to :TEST.TEST.NAM. But the value of this variable is something completely different to what was entered. Obviously the web server doesn't know what disk R is and a certain amount of translation occurs, but even if the file was located in a known directory such as ../../system/mail, this translation would still occur (and believe me, I tried this).

So when I write 'EXECUTE DELWINDOW 'f', :$.NAM, I am asking the system to delete a file called c:/tmp/tekwebsrv4f54z1784033580yc6/p2143200363.TXT, which of course does not exist. As a result of the translation, the file r:\1.txt does not get deleted. At first, I wondered how I was going to get the original name of the file as the first step that happens within the procedure is replacing the name with some unintelligable name. But then it occurred to me that the procedure is creating a customer order whose number is known (from the field GENERALLOAD.KEY1) and if I know the order number then I can extract from the order the purchase order number that is stored in the REFERENCE field. Thus I can rebuild the filename and delete it.