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CGI-Application-Plugin-TemplateRunner-0.04
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/ CGI::Application::Plugin::TemplateRunner

NAME

CGI::Application::Plugin::TemplateRunner - CGI::App plugin to display HTML::Templates without writing code

SYNOPSIS

  package MyApp;
  use base 'CGI::Application'
  use CGI::Application::Plugin::TemplateRunner
        qw( show_tmpl);
  
  sub setup{
          my $self = shift;
          $self->start_mode('show_tmpl');
          $self->run_modes(
                       'show_tmpl' => 'show_tmpl',
                       'some_action' => 'some_action',
               );
  }
  
  sub some_action{
          my $self = shift;
          # do some stuff with the database
          return $self->show_tmpl;
  }

DESCRIPTION

This module is a plugin for CGI::Application that provides a runmode to automatically get the name of an HTML::Template from the path_info string, load the template, fill it with data from an associated Perl data file and display the template.

EXPORT

There are three methods that you can use in CGI::App subclass. None of them are exported by default, you have to explicitly import them.

show_tmpl

This is a runmode. It extracts a page name from path_info. That name must end in .html and a file of the same name must be present in the applications tmpl_path (if you have multiple tmpl_path, in the first one). For example if you have

        http://mydomain/mycgi.cgi/bbs/index.html

it will look for

        $tmpl_path/bbs/index.html

That template will be loaded and displayed. See the detailed description below about where the data for the template is coming from.

prepare_tmpl

This method is used internally to load the template and fill in the data. You can also use it inside of your own runmodes if you want.

        my $tmpl = $self->prepare_tmpl(
                $filename, %extras);

You can use %extras to specify additional data to be used as template parameters (not found or overriding the data from the data file).

fill_tmpl

Another internal method that takes an HTML::Template instance and some data to put into it. It basically wraps around $tmpl->param to provide the additional functionality needed by this plugin (descending into hashes, calling coderefs).

        $self->fill_tmpl($tmpl, {
        '/somehash' => { one => 1, two=>2 }};

Where does the template get its data?

CGI parameters and cookies

CGI request parameters and cookies are automatically made available to the template. If you have

        http://mydomain/mycgi.cgi/bbs/index.html?page=4

you can get it as

        <tmpl_var /request/page>

and your cookie "ID" will become

        <tmpl_var /cookie/id>

Application parameters

Parameters set for the CGI::Application instance (using $app->param() ) are also automatically available to the template

        $app->param(foo => bar);
        
        <tmpl_var /app/foo>

The data file

When this module loads a template, it also tries to load an associated data file, which has the same name as the template plus ".pl" at the end. So for /bbs/index.html it will look for /bbs/index.html.pl (you have to put the data file next to the HTML file into your tmpl_path)

That data file is just a Perl file and gets eval'ed. It must return a hash ref with the data.

Here is an example:

        {
                page_title => 'BBS page',
                # becomes <tmpl_var /page_title>
                
                categories => [
                { name => 'Sports',  link => 'sports.html'},
                { name => 'TV', link => 'tv.html'},
                ],
                # becomes <tmpl_loop /categories>
                
                nested => { 
                        a=> 1, b => 2
                },
                # become <tmpl_var /nested/a>
                # and <tmpl_var /nested/b>
                
                articles => sub{
                        my $app = shift;
                        # subroutines get the CGI::App
                        # instance as their only parameter
                        my $q = $app->query;
                        my $page = $q->param('page')||1;
                        my $total = MyDB::get_article_count;
                        my $page = MyDB::get_article_list($page);
                        return {
                                total => $total,
                                page => $page};
                };
                # becomes
                # <tmpl_var /articles/total>
                # <tmpl_loop /articles/page>
        }

extra parameters to prepare_tmpl

If you use prepare_tmpl in your runmodes, you can stuff in extra data:

       my $tmpl = $self->prepare_tmpl(
                $filename, 'more' => 'data')
                
        <tmpl_var /more>

These extras can override all other parameters.

Using _default

Usually, the path of the requested HTML page in the URL corresponds directly to a template and optionally a data file: For mycgi.cgi/bbs/index.html you would use /bbs/index.html and /bbs/index.html.pl.

This can be made a little more flexible with the _default system: If an exact match for the URL is not found, parts of the path can be substituted by _default.

Motivation

I believe that query parameters should only be used for form data, not for something that just identifies an page. If nothing else, not having query parameters makes for much easier links (query parameters tend to get lost unless you explicitly include them every time, which can be a lot of work).

For example, if you have a URL like

  mycgi.cgi/bbs/show.html?bbs=1234

I would very much prefer

  mycgi.cgi/bbs/1234.html

This can be implemented by creating

  /bbs/_default.html 
  /bbs/_default.html.pl

In the absence of 1234.html, this template and data file will be used.

Accessing the extra parameters

So how do you get to the page number "1234" in the html template and the data file?

The data file subroutines gets passed the "1234" as an extra parameter:

  {
     article => sub {
                my ($app, $no) = @_;   # no = 1234
                return MyDB::get_article($no);
    },
  };

In the template you can use

   <tmpl_var _defaults/1 >

Multiple _default

You can match more than one _default in the URL path if you want:

   mycgi.cgi/articles/culture/music/5555.html

   /articles/_default/_default/_default.html

The matches are passed to template and data file in left-to-right order:

  {
     article => sub {
                my ($app, $cat, $subcat, $no) = @_;   
                return MyDB::get_article($no);
    },
  }

  Category: <tmpl_var _defaults/1>
  Subcategory: <tmpl_var _defaults/2>
  Article Number: <tmpl_var _defaults/3>

Note that because you place templates and data files in the directory structure, you always know in advance how many of these parameters to expect.

Using this class as a CGI::App subclass

For very simple applications, especially ones that only display some data but do not allow to edit it, the single runmode provided by this module is probably all you need. In this case, you do not have to make your own CGI::App subclass at all, but can use this module directly from your instance scripts:

        #!/usr/bin/perl
        use CGI::Application::Plugin::TemplateRunner;
        my $app = new CGI::Application::Plugin::TemplateRunner();
        $app->tmpl_path('/home/webapps/thisone/tmpl');
        $app->run;

SEE ALSO

AUTHOR

Thilo Planz, <thiloplanz@web.de>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright 2004/05 by Thilo Planz

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.