NAME

Catalyst::Plugin::Params::Nested - Nested form parameters (ala Ruby on Rails).

SYNOPSIS

            

              
              
use Catalyst qw/Params::Nested/;
# using this html
<form ...>
    <!-- can be with either subscripted or dot notation -->
    <input name="foo[bar]" ... />
    <input name="foo.gorch" ... />
</form>
# turns params into hashrefs:
$c->req->param('foo')->{bar};
$c->req->params({
    # extra params
    foo => {
        bar => ...,
        gorch => ...
    },
    # original params untouched
    'foo[bar]' => ...,
    'foo.gorch' => ...,
});
            
          

DESCRIPTION

Ruby on Rails has a nice feature to create nested parameters that help with the organization of data in a form - parameters can be an arbitrarily deep nested structure.

The way this structure is denoted is that when you construct a form the field names have a special syntax which is parsed.

This plugin supports two syntaxes:

dot notation

            

              
              
<input name="foo.bar.gorch" />
            
          

subscript notation

            

              
              
<input name="foo[bar][gorch]" />
            
          

When reading query parameters from $c->req you can now access the all the items starting with "foo" as one entity using $c->req->param('foo');. Each subitem, denoted by either the dot or the square brackets, will be returned as a further deeper hashref.

INTERNAL METHODS

prepare_uploads

Overrides "prepare_uploads" in Catalyst to expand the parameter data structure post factum.

CAVEATS

No attempt is made to merge data intelligently. If you do this:

            

              
              
<input name="foo" />
<input name="foo.bar" />
            
          

the foo parameter will stay untouched, and you'll have to access foo.bar using its full string name:

            

              
              
$c->req->param("foo.bar");
            
          

AUTHORS

Yuval Kogman, nothingmuch@woobling.org

Jess Robinson

COPYRIGHT & LICENSE

            

              
              
Copyright (c) 2005 the aforementioned authors. All rights
reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute
it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.
            
          

SEE ALSO

CGI::Expand