At 02:26 PM 6/7/2001 +1000, Steve Smith wrote:
> > HTML::Embperl
>
>For me, this has one major win over the other toolkits: auto form
>population from a hash. The online mortgage application system I
>wrote has about 1,800 form fields, which have to be populated with
>data from a database. By making the form fields match DB column
>names, I can reduce the code to do this to:
>
> my $data = $dbh->fetchrow_hashref($query);
> %fdat = (%fdat, %$data);
>
>Embperl then parses the form and populates it with the matching
>name=>value pairs in %fdat, including select options. Beautiful!
Not that it's a reality now, but this is one of the things that the Perl
Widget Library project on source forge is hoping to accomplish for template
languages. It's a cross template way of organizing form information and map
it to db fields.
The reality is that there are many fields that cannot map easily 1-1 to a
database as you say. eg a date in a database is usually a date field. But
in a form, it might be a combination of 3 form fields (dropdown for month,
year and day separately).
Later,
Gunther
