Re: Datafile doesn't update before being read

[George_Sherston]

Good that you post some code. I don't entirely agree with respected sibling Sifmole - I'd encourage you not to be parsimonious with your code posting. As it was, your question was about a thing that happens when you refresh your web page, if I understood it, but the code you posted doesn't seem to cover that.

So my first suggestion is, don't be shy, post away (on the other hand other monks may be working with a more current version of SOPW::Psychic than I have and may be able to answer based on what we have).

My second suggestion is - you say

I have a CGI script that (1) writes to a datafile, then (2) immediately reads that file in order to print to a webpage.

- now there's probably a good reason for this, but on the face of it, why bother with the read at (2)? - you've already got the data in memory, so couldn't you just send it to the browser?

§ George Sherston

[ghopper]

I guess I was trying to keep my program "modular," reduce the number of global variables to a minimum, so I guess that's why didn't just use the array I made earlier later.

In retrospect, however, you're 100% right. I simply made @strmeta a global variable and didn't bother reprocessing the data. Then the problem went away and as an extra bonus, the page loads faster.

Thanks a lot, George!

--ghopper

[George_Sherston]

Your'e welcome. I (and others doubtless) applaud your desire to be modular. How about this, then?: take your subroutine for printing output from an array. Not sure what you're calling this - say print_page. Now, instead of making @strmeta a global, make a local variable and pass a reference to it to the subroutine.

That is, call your subroutine like

my @strmeta = .....
[...]
print_page(\@strmeta);

Then in the subroutine make the first line

my $strmeta = shift;

And thereafter, where before you had @strmeta use @$strmeta, and where you had $strmeta[$foo] put $strmeta->[$foo] - which will "de-reference" (i.e. get the data out of) your reference $strmeta.

Then, if you set it up like that, you can call the same subroutine from two different points in your script - (a) when you've created @strmeta from your form input, and (b) when you've created it from retrieved data. Your subroutine won't care where the data comes from, so long as it comes in an array reference.

For your last trick, put print_page() in a module, and use it in all your other scripts!

Enjoy!

§ George Sherston