[TriLUG] Question for web/CGI people

[Andrew Perrin]

This is taxing my (admittedly weak) web skills and I suspect there are
others out there for whom it is easy.

I'm working on a homegrown system for tracking books and reviewers for the
sociology journal we edit here, _Social Forces_. It's LAMP, as in
Linux-Apache-Middleware-PostgreSQL. Most of it is pretty straightforward,
but I've got a procedural problem.

When a reviewer is assigned to a book, I want two distinct things to
happen: (1) a letter is generated, to be printed and sent out by
snail-mail; and (2) the user is redirected back to a blank assignment
screen. I know how to make either one of these happen, but am stymied by
how to make *both* happen at once. Is there a way to make a submit button
that will both open a new browser window with the generated PDF, *and*
redirect the current browser window to the CGI script?

To whatever extent it matters, I'm working in perl, using CGI.pm, and the
letter will be generated using LaTeX.

Thanks,
Andy

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Andrew J Perrin - http://www.unc.edu/~aperrin
Assistant Professor of Sociology, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
clists at perrin.socsci.unc.edu * andrew_perrin (at) unc.edu