Error with opening a connection to a url (for cgi use)

Question

i still am having trouble using a cgi executable on my server, but i cant seem to narrow down what my problem is.
i followed the following tutorial, but am still getting errors.
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/networking/urls/readingWriting.html
              //  first of all, am I doing this right? all the examples leave out the '.cgi' at the end, why?
              //does it matter? i tried both ways, i even tried with the ?var1=something stuff at the end. nope.
              url = new URL("http://www.somewhere.com/" + "write.cgi");
              urlConnection = url.openConnection();
              urlConnection.setDoOutput(true);
              // here is where I get an IOException error ----  error.getCause() yields an output of null
              PrintWriter out = new PrintWriter(urlConnection.getOutputStream());
              // i also am not sure how sending to the cgi works. my cgi file was written to parse a string
              // such as this: "http://www.somewhere.com/fileio.cgi?field1=something&field2=something+else"
              out.println("whatever i need to send it")
              out.close();is it possible i'm getting this error because my cgi file isnt set up right? i am confident that it is ok, but i dont know for sure, nor do i know how to test it. typing in
/fileio.cgi?field1=something&field2=something+else into the working directory of my webpage yields an error that says something like that page isnt readable. i had hoped i could test the cgi this way...is there another way?
thanks!

Answer 1

Using the URLConnection output stream doesn't append attributes to the url. If you want to send parameters on the url use
url = new URL("http://www.somewhere.com/write.cgi?field1=something&field2=something+else");