/ 
HTML-FormFiller-0.04
/ HTML::FormFiller

NAME

HTML::FormFiller - refill html forms

DESCRIPTION

Quite often when working with user input from HTML forms it is useful to be able to show the same form again with fields repopulated with the information previously provided by the user.

MOTIVATION

Although there's already a module in existance to pre-populate forms when running under CGI (HTML::FillInForm) it requires a CGI object to work.

This module implements the same idea but without the dependency on CGI/mod_perl. Simply pass in the HTML and the hash of form field data and let the module do the rest.

SYNOPSIS

First you need some HTML markup ($html), preferably with form fields in it. You also need a hash-reference ($form_field_data) containing form field data in a 'fieldname' => 'fieldvalue' format.

Assuming you have form fields called first_name, last_name and email, you should then populate your hash as follows:

$form_field_data = {
  'first_name' => 'John',
  'last_name'  => 'Smith',
  'email'      => 'johnsmith@hotmail.com',
}

You would incorporate this into a script similar to the following:

use HTML::FormFiller;

# lots of code

# prefill form fields
$filled = HTML::FormFiller->fill({
  'html'   => $html,
  'fields' => $form_field_data
});

# send the output to the browser
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print $filled;

STORING FORM DATA

There are probably many different ways to get form data into a key-value formatted hash. Here's one to copy-and-paste if you don't have the time to think up your own way of doing this.

In this snippet $request is an Apache::Request object. After this block is called you'll find your form field data in $page_vars. This method accounts for fields that might return a list of values, for example a checkbox group.

# fetch parameters from the request
my @params = $request->param();
foreach my $param_name (@params) {
  my @param_values = $request->param($param_name);
  # check for parameters with multiple values; e.g. check boxes
  # since $#arrayname can be -ve we can't just use if ($#array){..}
  if ($#param_values > 0) {
    # multiple values
    $page_vars->{$param_name} = \@param_values;
  }
  else {
    # single value
    $page_vars->{$param_name} = $param_values[0];
  }
}

AUTHOR

Chisel Wright, <chisel@herlpacker.co.uk>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENCE

Copyright (C) 2004 by Chisel Wright

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself, either Perl version 5.8.2 or, at your option, any later version of Perl 5 you may have available.