Webmaster Forum / ColdFusion / Advanced Techniques / October 2007

That's not going to get you too far: CF always returns "YES" for
isDefined("CGI.anythingYouLikeHere").

You'd want to do:
structKeyExists(CGI, "anythingYouLikeHere")

EG:
structKeyExists(CGI, "http_referer")

But in the case of CGI.http_referer, it ALWAYS exists.  It might just be
blank.

Thank you all for the responses so far.  I've been reading up on http_referer
and I'm starting to think it's too unreliable (i.e., often blocked/blank) for
my purposes.  Is there any other way I can make sure that the users trying to
access my website are only coming from a specific page?  For example, in the
link to my website in the "source" website, I could have a URL variable, which
I would check to make sure it existed on my side before allowing the users to
access the website.  But that seems to flimsy since any user could look at the
bottom of the screen when hovering over the link to get the url and url
variable.  After that, the user would no longer need to go through the first
page/site but would simply have to type in the URL with the URL variable.  Is
there any way to mask the passing of a URL variable?  Any other suggestions?

Thanks again

Accept the OP said that the page was on another domain outside the
website.

Have you checked into you web server of choice.  I am familiar with both
Apache and IIS having the capability to restrict access to a web site
based on clients IP address.  Not full proof, but then very little with
web applications is entirely fool proof.

Dan, thanks for the suggestion.  I should've mentioned this already but the
first website is on a different (non-CF) server and the only thing I will have
control over is probably what the link looks like.  That's why I was hoping the
http_referer would do the trick.