Re: Re: Nirvana through the templating yin yang (TT2 / CGI.pm)

[thraxil]

HTML::Template also makes it easy and clean to make other form elements sticky. it lets you just associate the CGI object with the template:

my $query = new CGI;
my $template = HTML::Template->new(filename => 'template.tmpl',
                                   associate => $query);

and a template variable is set for every param that CGI knows about.

for selects, i still don't like to use $query->popup_menu. instead i have a function in a standard library that i use for all my web programming like so:

sub selectify {
    my $values = shift;
    my $labels = shift;
    my $selected = shift;
    my %selected = map {$_ => 1} @{$selected};

    return [map {
        {
            value => $_,
            label => shift @{$labels},
            selected => $selected{$_} || "",
        }
    } @{$values}];
}

so in my code i can do:

$template->param(some_loop => selectify(\@values,\@labels,[$query->par
+am('some_param')]);

and in the template:

<select name="some_param">
<tmpl_loop name="some_loop">
  <tmpl_include name="inner_loop.tmpl">
</tmpl_loop>
</select>

inner_loop.tmpl is factored out into its own template so i can reuse it all over the place. it just contains:

<option value="<tmpl_var name="value" escape="html">"<tmpl_if name="se
+lected"> selected="selected"</tmpl_if>><tmpl_var name="label" escape=
+"html"></option>

i don't know, i guess i just can't stand the thought of any of my output html being generated by CGI.pm and not totally controlled by my templates. that way if the designer wants to add a size, or class attribute to the select, they don't have to ask me to add it to the perl code.

anders pearson