Intermediate Tutorial - Step 9: Modules & mod_perl Print

FormBuilder is designed to work well alone, alongside other modules, or even in a mod_perl environment. FormBuilder is written under use strict and is completely mod_perl safe.

The key to interacting with any of these situations is the params option to new(). We discussed this before, in the section on "Custom Headers". By default, FormBuilder assumes it has complete control of the CGI environment, and will create its own instance of CGI.pm to manage it.

However, when you're already using CGI.pm yourself, or running under mod_perl, this is obviously not true. So, in either of these situations you need to specify the params option to new().

First, using FormBuilder with CGI.pm:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use CGI;
use CGI::FormBuilder;

$query = new CGI;
$form  = CGI::FormBuilder->new(
             method => 'post',
             fields => [qw/name email zipcode/],
             params => $query
         );

print $form->render;

package My::Application;    # or whatever

use Apache::Request;
use CGI::FormBuilder;

sub handler {
    my $r = Apache::Request->new(shift);
    my $form = CGI::FormBuilder->new(
                    method => 'post',
                    fields => [qw/name email zipcode/],
                    params => $r
               );
    print $form->render;
}

Finally, note that the params and values options are separate, and both can be specified. The values option is designed to provide default values to populate the form with. The params option changes where to get CGI parameters from. CGI parameters will always override any default values.

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