Yesterday I ported a few thousand lines of code I'd been working on over to Perl. It was quite a bit of work getting all of the strict stuff correct and then fighting with the modules-do-not-reload problem, but it's now mostly dealt with, and my code's much cleaner and more modularized. (Huzzah.)
Unfortunately I've been continuing to have one program that I can't figure out. Somehow, my information being submitted through forms sometimes reverts to old data after I've clicked "Submit" and before it's processed. Now, I've read through much of the mod_perl documents, FAQs, etc., and I understand the general shape of *why* this happens. It's the result of mod_perl keeping the perl modules, and thus the variables, in memory. When I hit a server that's already been loaded, I get incorrect results. What I don't understand is *how* it's happening in this specific case, because I'm being very careful about clearly setting my variables each time through. There must be some aspect of how mod_perl works that I'm missing. I'm hoping someone here can (1) tell me what I'm doing wrong in this specific case and (2) tell me where my mental map is incorrect. Anyway, here we go. I start off with a simple index.cgi that I've made extremely short to avoid the issue of nested subroutines. It has a require: -- $main::filePath = "/var/www/skotos/myskotos"; require "${main::filePath}/modules/lib/mylib.pm"; -- From that required library, I set my $cgi variable: -- package mylib; use CGI; use CGI::Pretty qw( :html3 ); $mylib::cgi = new CGI; -- It's a global variable, but that seems entirely appropriate for something that's used in nearly every function. And, it gets explicitly set every time the program is run. Back in the original index.cgi, I have the problems when it's called to process form information. Here's that particular segment of code: -- require "${main::filePath}/modules/web/myedit.pm"; my $action = $mylib::cgi->param('action'); $main::pageNumber = $mylib::cgi->param('pageNumber'); $main::contentType = $mylib::cgi->param('contentType'); if ($action eq "editpage") { &myedit::ProcessEditPage(); } elsif ($action eq "editcontent") { &myedit::ProcessEditContent(); } -- And, pretty much ANY of those parameters that I call in from $cgi can come up wrong. Both the local variables defined by my ($action) and the global variables set to $main ($pageNumber, $contentType) ... which tells me that the problem is back in that $cgi reference. But why? Can I not set variables which might change down in modules? That would seem grossly limiting if so, given that I've moved everything to modules in order to avoid the nested subroutine problems. Or am I missing something else? I should mention, that out of extreme paranoia at this point I'm even trying to undef $cgi when I'm done, to no effect. -- END { $mylib::dbh->disconnect if $mylib::dbh; undef $mylib::cgi; } -- Help? Shannon -- Shannon -- "You met me at a very strange time in my life." --_Fight Club_