Re: Re^2: PHP (and Perl) at Yahoo!

[Ovid]

That sounds reasonable, but this is part of some slightly different functionality that is designed to work specifically with our current Template Toolkit setup here at work. Data::FormValidator appears nice, but I felt that a small, custom-designed tool that is a drop-in replacement for our code was the way to go. My first chance to use this took a 450 line program and reduced it down to 150 lines. No changes to our templates were required. Further, Data::FormValidator makes no reference to untainting the data.

Don't get me wrong, Data::FormValidator looks great, but it didn't appear to quite be what I need. Subclassing it might have been an option, but it makes internal function calls rather than method calls and that can make subclassing a pain because I would have to reimplement the functions rather than inherit them. The code below demonstrates the problem.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;
package Foo;

sub new {
    my $class = shift;
    bless {}, $class;
}

sub foobared {
    my $self = shift;
    $self->{foo} = _test( 3 );
}

sub _test { shift }

package Bar;
@Bar::ISA = 'Foo';
sub foobared {
    my $self = shift;
    $self->{foo} = $self->_test( 3 );
}

package Main;
my $o = Foo->new;
$o->foobared;
print $o->{foo},$/;
my $o2 = Bar->new;
$o2->foobared;
print $o2->{foo};

As you can see, mixing regular functions with methods doesn't work. You can't inherit because you have an extra argument.

Cheers,
Ovid

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[Aristotle]

Oh, I meant that as in writing a patch to Data::FormValidator, not subclassing just for your own perusal. :-) I like that module a lot but I believe it needs this feature to be really complete.

Makeshifts last the longest.