2 messages in com.mysql.lists.perlRe: Review Web Form Entry Before Fina...| From | Sent On | Attachments |
|---|---|---|
| Douglas S. Davis | 17 Mar 2005 11:10 | |
| Sean Quinlan | 17 Mar 2005 11:33 |
| Subject: | Re: Review Web Form Entry Before Final Submission |
|---|---|
| From: | Sean Quinlan (se...@quinlan.org) |
| Date: | 03/17/2005 11:33:36 AM |
| List: | com.mysql.lists.perl |
On Thu, 2005-03-17 at 14:11 -0500, Douglas S. Davis wrote:
Hi,
I write a lot of programs in Perl that display a web form, and the user then fills it in, and I like to give them a chance to review the information that they've submitted and have the opportunity to go back (via the Back button in their browser) to make changes before the final "set in stone" submission.
What's the best way to do this?
I've usually used a cookie. If the size of the information or security considerations are such that that's not feasible, then I return an md5 hex key as the cookie and store the input in the DB with that as the key. I generally just use %params = $cgi->Vars; to get the form data and stringify %params with Data::Dumper. Some field types can require special handling and of course YMMV.
I also have a little toolbox of functions for generating dropdowns, radio buttons and such so I don't have to rewrite adding "select" to the appropriate options in the HTML over and over.
What I've been doing is this:
A Perl script creates the form (or sometimes it's just a standard HTML page).
The user fills it in then clicks "Preview" or some such button.
The form data is processed by a ReadParse subroutine from cgi-lib.pl and then spit back out as a webpage to show the data the user submitted.
The data is also in a form on that page with all of the data as hidden fields which if they click Submit will then be sent to a MySQL database.
If they click the Back button in their browser instead of Submit, they can make changes, Preview and Submit/Edit again ad infinitum.
It's rather tedious to have to spit their data back at them and have it all in a form as hidden fields, but I haven't figured out a better way to do it.
I'd like to have the data go to a MySQL database when they click Preview, and then if they click Back and edit the info, the data in the database would just be updated, but how would I do that? They'd have to get some type of unique ID that would be present in the page when they go back to it or it would have to be present when they first load the web form so that the data could be matched up.
I'm sure there are much better ways to do it than what I'm doing. Please enlighten me.
As mentioned above, variations based on the concept below, storing the key as a cookie or hidden field as appropriate.
Dumper to turn a data structure (all the form values) into a string that can be later eval'd back into a data structure: http://search.cpan.org/~ilyam/Data-Dumper-2.121/
md5_hex to generate a unique key based on the data. http://search.cpan.org/~gaas/Digest-MD5-2.33/
Both of those modules should already be installed on your system.
Quick example: my %params = $cgi->Vars; # if you don't like getting %params from $cgi, you can just list all # values as you have them and their names in Dump my $param_dump = Data::Dumper->Dump([\%params],["*params"]); my $now = localtime; my $key = md5_hex("$param_dump,$now");
HTH
-- Sean Quinlan <se...@quinlan.org>