Corion's got good ideas, but as it looks like you're playing with DBI, you'd really want to go with place holders if you can. Even if this is an intranet application, you should be thinking about security and taintness of your data at all times; DBI's placeholders do any automatic quoting of what goes in as to protect your database from harm.

If I assume that you eventually have code like: 

# @where_clause has been fully defined

my $query = "SELECT * FROM $table WHERE ";
$query .= join " AND ", @where_clause;

my $sth->prepare( $query ) or die #stuff;
$sth->execute( ) or die #stuff;

[download]
Then you can still use placeholders by pushing the data into another array, which is then passed to the execute() function: 
# From your code above:
if (defined($allocated_to) && $allocated_to ne '') {
push @where_clause, "UPPER(ALLOCATED_TO) LIKE UPPER(?)";
push @entries, 'ALLOCATED_TO';
push @values, '\%$allocated_to\%';
} 
#
# yada yada yada
#
my $query = "SELECT * FROM $table WHERE ";
$query .= join " AND ", @where_clause;

my $sth->prepare( $query ) or die #stuff;
$sth->execute( @values ) or die #stuff;

[download]

-----------------------------------------------------
Dr. Michael K. Neylon - mneylon-pm@masemware.com || "You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain
"I can see my house from here!"
It's not what you know, but knowing how to find it if you don't know that's important

In reply to Re: Cleanup time by Masem
in thread Cleanup time by maderman

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