Yay hope! Thanks, Jessica.

Last week I got to threaten the MPAA with copyright infringement charges. It was great fun. They distributed a CD designed to combat copyright infringement which infringed on my copyright as they stole my code.

You mean like this?

MPAA Forced To Take Down University Toolkit

Slashdot's so pretty these days...

I feel old.

I have an HTML link that calls a javascript function, like such:

a href="javascript:doit(112,'pdf_files/filename.pdf');" class="smalldarkbold"

The function is defined as:

function doit(docid,link){
            findex.docid.value = docid;
            findex.gotopage.value = link;
            findex.submit();
            }

Where is this docid defined? What does findex do? And how is this at all relevant?

I swear, I try to google these things, but I usually can't figure out what search terms to use. I throw myself upon the mercy of the Toms, amych, and anyone else who actually speaks Javascript.

Is there an "include" anywhere?

eta: it would look something like:

<SCRIPT src="SCRIPTS/validation.js" ></SCRIPT>

eta² "validation.js" is just an example of an include file

This page is included in another page. Oh, I see.

Okay, so the parent page has this form defined:

form name="findex" method=post action="index.asp"
              input type=hidden name="CompanyId" value=%=Session("CompanyId")%
              input type=hidden name="AuthorityLevel" value=%=Session("AuthorityLevel")%
              input type=hidden name="docid" value=0
              input type=hidden name="gotopage" value=' '
            /form

(Wow, that took five tries to format.)

So the page is secretly gathering information about who clicks on what, and using a docid defined in the link to track it. Yes?

The page is passing the information to another page, yes, but there's no way to know from this what information it's gathering or keeping -- it could just as easily be checking that the person doing the clicking is authorized to see filename.pdf and that's all.

In other words, the docid is just passing on "this is the document we're talking about", rather than saying anything further about what's being tracked and how. But you're quite right about the fact that it's passing along the reference to that file.

Apparently another coworker has seen this mysterious report, and we think no one's used it in years. Ah, the smell of obsolete things.

Given that we have no way of telling how they numbered these documents, I think I may just make the link straight HTML and see if anyone complains.

Thanks, guys.

Yeah, if there's no clear need for doing it and no way to predict what it does, it's just useless code. Ditch it.