perltutorial boo_radley <h4>Problem</h4> You want to display data online in a monthly view. <h4>Solution</h4> Make use of [cpan://HTML::CalendarMonthSimple] to provide a programmatic interface to the contents of an HTML calendar month. <code>#! c:/perl/bin/perl.exe use strict; use CGI qw (header); use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser); use DBI; use HTML::CalendarMonthSimple; my $myyear=2001; my $mymonth=10; # month to pull data on # # set up database connectivity & retrieve records # the dbi method selectall_arrayref was added in DBI v1.15. # my $dbi=DBI->connect("DBI:mysql:host=myhost:user=nobody") || die ("no dbi",DBI->errstr); $dbi->do ("use mydatabase") || die DBI->errstr; my @items = @{$dbi->selectall_arrayref ( "SELECT title, dayofmonth(date), detail FROM table WHERE month (date) = $mymonth AND year (date) = $myyear order by dayofmonth(date)")}; # # set up the calendar & populate information # my $cal = new HTML::CalendarMonthSimple('year'=>$myyear,'month'=>$mymonth); $cal->width('100%'); $cal->border(2); $cal->header('Monthly data'); $cal->bgcolor('whitesmoke'); # # populate calendar with data # foreach my $row (@items) { $cal->addcontent($$row[1], "<b>$$row[0]</b> <br /> <i>$$row[2]</i>"); } print header; print $cal->as_HTML; </code> <h4>Discussion</h4> This short example provides the barest methods for inputting data into an HTML::CalendarMonthSimple object, and the displaying that calendar.<br/> The new method takes 2 optional arguments, year and month. If either is missing, the current month or year will be used. This can be useful if you want a calendar of the current month in a previous year.<br /> <b>Example : </b><code> my $cal = new HTML::CalendarMonthSimple ('year'=>1990);</code> will make a calendar for October 1990.<p> content is added to each day via the setcontent and addcontent methods; setcontent replaces any existing data, and addcontent appends to the day's data. <b>Example : </b><code>$cal->setcontent(31,"Halloween!"); </code> puts "Halloween" into the 31st day of the calendar.<br> <b>Example : </b><code>$cal->addcontent(31,"<br>Buy lots of candy for the kids"); </code> appends a second line to the same date.<br> In addition to specifying the exact day, references like "2FRIDAY" can be used to place information in certain cells when the date value may not be known (think paydays, for example).<p> In addition to the methods listed above, there are a large host of methods which control the layout & presentation of the calendar; colors, fonts and html attributes can be configured easily, and calendar layout can be manipulated as well.<br> There are some things which could be done better -- this module is not warning-safe due to concatenation of undef'd strings in a few places, and the HTML produced is not in strict compliance with HTML 3 standards, causing tidy to produce warnings. I feel that these are not insurmountable problems though, and have found that working with HTML::CalendarMonthSimple has been a rewarding and speedy way to present data over the web.<p> <b>update</b> I've patched the source code to prevent the warnings from occuring and as a side effect, this will emit smaller html. I've contacted the module's owner about the patches.<p> <b>update (20Nov01)</b> The patches I submitted have been integrated into the module, so it should be warning safe now.