Esteemed Monks,

But for once the unanticipated behaviour is actually very useful! I was working on this method from my CGI::Application based webapp when I got interupted. Without thinking I ran the ocde and it did what I need. But I new I hadn't used the $form->output method to get the final HTML fragment for the form, which I was then going to pass through HTML::FillInForm. It turns out that passing \$form to HTML::FillInForm got me the results I wanted anyway - BEFORE I had parsed the template.

Here is the code fragment, it works and for that I am grateful, but I am not sure why! Can somebody help me understand please?

sub en_display {
    # Display 'full signup or enroll' form
    my $self = shift;
    my $errs = shift;
    my $form_output ='';
    my $sess = $self->param('up_session');
    my %data = '';
    
    my $page = $self->load_tmpl('gila/index.html');
    my $form = $self->load_tmpl('ap_enroll.html', die_on_bad_params =>
+ 0);
    # If _IS_USER is present and _IS_REGISTERED is set then we have pa
+rtial data in the DB.
    if ( $sess->param('_IS_USER') && $sess->param('_IS_REGISTERED') &&
+ !ref $errs ) {
        my $obj = AppSys::User->search( 'upusername' => $sess->param('
+_IS_USER'));
        while ( my $usr = $obj->next ) {
            foreach ( $usr->columns ) {
                $data{$_} = $usr->$_;
            }
        }
        # Get partial data into form, add to page and output
        my $fif = HTML::FillInForm->new();
        $fif->fill(scalarref => \$form, fdat => \%data);
        $page->param('form_text' => $form->output());
        return $page->output();
        } elsif ( ref $errs ) {
        # If there are errors then D::FV has handled HTML stuff
        $form->param($errs);
        $page->param('form_text' => $form->output());
        return $page->output();
        } else {
        # No partial, no errors, just output blank form
        $page->param('form_text' => $form->output());
        return $page->output();
    }
}
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jdtoronto