mod_perl and CGI behavior - perl

Question

This has got to be something silly I'm doing wrong. It's such a newbie type problem.
The original script is something that sits and waits for a 3rd party to connect and POST some xml to it, it takes that xml, does some validation, and stores it in a db. That part is fine. The problem is my response. I'm trying to use the header() function from CGI and it's just not behaving. It comes up blank. Obviously I could just do this manually and just print the header string, but now I'm really curious why this is behaving so strangely.
Here is a stripped down test version of the cgi script:
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper::Names;
use CGI qw(:standard);
use Apache2::Connection ();
use Apache2::RequestRec ();
$| = 1;
# Grab the request object provided by mod_perl.
our $request_obj = shift;
our $connection = $request_obj->connection;
our $remote_ip = $connection->client_ip();
my $cgi = CGI->new($request_obj->args());
print STDERR Dumper($cgi);
my $input = $cgi->param('POSTDATA');
print STDERR Dumper($input);
my $cgi_header = $cgi->header();
print STDERR Dumper($cgi_header);
my $cgi_full_header = $cgi->header(-type => 'application/xml');
print STDERR Dumper($cgi_full_header);
my $q = CGI->new({});
print STDERR Dumper($q);
my $q_header = $q->header();
print STDERR Dumper($q_header);
my $q_full_header = $q->header(-type => 'application/xml' );
print STDERR Dumper($q_full_header);
And the output:
$cgi = bless( {
'.r' => bless( do{\(my $o = '94118860562256')}, 'Apache2::RequestRec' ),
'param' => {
'POSTDATA' => [
'test'
],
'XForms:Model' => [
'test'
]
},
'use_tempfile' => 1,
'.fieldnames' => {},
'.charset' => 'ISO-8859-1',
'escape' => 1,
'.parameters' => [
'XForms:Model',
'POSTDATA'
]
}, 'CGI' );
$input = 'test';
$cgi_header = '';
$cgi_full_header = '';
$q = bless( {
'.parameters' => [
'XForms:Model',
'POSTDATA'
],
'escape' => 1,
'.fieldnames' => {},
'.charset' => 'ISO-8859-1',
'use_tempfile' => 1,
'.r' => bless( do{\(my $o = '94118860562256')}, 'Apache2::RequestRec' ),
'param' => {
'POSTDATA' => [
''
],
'XForms:Model' => [
''
]
}
}, 'CGI' );
$q_header = '';
$q_full_header = '';
And here is the simple test script I'm using to send the POST.
#!/perl/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use DBI;
use URI;
use LWP::UserAgent;
use Data::Dumper::Names;
my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
$ua->max_size( 131072 );
$ua->agent('test_xml_pusher');
$ua->ssl_opts(verify_hostname => 0);
my $url = URI->new;
$url->scheme('https');
$url->host('xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx');
$url->port(443);
$url->path_segments('test.cgi');
# Yes, I know... it's not valid xml... don't care for the purposes of this test.
#
my $xml = 'test';
my $response = $ua->post( $url, Content => $xml, 'Content-Type' => 'application/xml' );
print Dumper($response);
my $status_line = $response->status_line;
print Dumper($status_line);
my $content = $response->content;
print Dumper($content);
So why is $cgi_header empty? And why does $q end up being a reference to the same thing as $cgi even though I tried initializing it as my $q = CGI->new({});? (I also tried empty quotes instead of empty brackets.)
Any thoughts?
Thanks!
My environment is a centos 7 server running apache httpd 2.4.34 with mod_perl 2.0.11 and perl 5.22.4. (httpd is installed from from SCL, but perl and mod_perl are installed from source.)
--
Andy