Forum Moderators: phranque
I've made a rather large blunder which I'm hoping someone might have a suggestion to help me fix it. In my spare time I produce some software with a time-limited trial. When the software is run it accesses a URL with a unique identifier as a parameter, the webservice then responds with the expiry date for that particular identifier so the software knows when to end the trial.
In this latest version I thought I'd be REALLY clever and add another parameter so that I could record which versions of the software people were using, but (as I now realise) I stupidly put a space in it, e.g.
[mydomain.com...] build1234
When I tested this on my machine at home it worked fine, so I included it in the latest release of the software, sent an email out to everyone on my contacts list so that everyone knew to upgrade. I noticed to my horror that when I tried to use it at work it didn't work! The space in the URL caused my webserver to return an error 400 (bad request). So this means that people who are using the trial of the software are now getting it absolutely free. I can't release an update for the software either because the software uses the response from the webservice to determine whether an update is availble - obviously if it's getting an error 400 it can't do this.
I was wondering if anyone had any ideas on what I could do server-side to make it recognise the URL with a space in it and stop returning a 400 error message? I do think it strange that it would work at home, using Windows 2000 and Windows XP, but at work (where I also use XP) it doesn't - it's using the same web server, so it should be alright...?
I'd really appreciate help with this, as it basically means that almost 2000 might now be using my software free of charge.
Many thanks
I'm using apache tomcat with coyote 1.1
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