Sibling monks - I crave your indulgence - I have two ways to do a thing, neither of which quite hits the spot. Is there a Third Way?

I'm outputting a CGI form via HTML::Template. Sometimes it's a blank form, sometimes it has values filled in (because the user selected them in an earlier session). Now, I have a lot of drop-down (or pop-up if you're a CGI.pm buff) menus. To populate those menus with values using HTML::Template I can't see any alternative to having a series of <TMPL_IF> statements, like:

      <select name="MinDuration">
        <option value=0<TMPL_IF MINDURATION0> selected</TMPL_IF>> any
        <option value=1<TMPL_IF MINDURATION1> selected</TMPL_IF>> one 
+day
        <option value=2<TMPL_IF MINDURATION2> selected</TMPL_IF>> two 
+days
        <option value=3<TMPL_IF MINDURATION3> selected</TMPL_IF>> thre
+e days
        <option value=4<TMPL_IF MINDURATION4> selected</TMPL_IF>> four
+ days
        <option value=5<TMPL_IF MINDURATION5> selected</TMPL_IF>> one 
+week
      </select>
[download]

But that means (AFAIK) that in the hash which I feed to my template I have to have lots ofkeys that don't do anything - i.e. to select "3 days":

$my_template->param(
    {
        minduration0 => 0,
        minduration1 => 0,
        minduration2 => 0,
        minduration3 => 1,
        minduration4 => 0,
        minduration5 => 0,
    }
);
[download]

Plus, this is ugly because there is no direct relationship between the returned value and the value I feed to my template.

The alternative I see is to use CGI.pm to generate the whole menu. Then instead of the html above I'd just have

<TMPL_VAR DATEMENU>
[download]

And then in the script I'd have

$my_template->param(
    {
        datemenu => popup_menu(
        -name => 'MinDuration',
        -values => [0..5],
        -default => 3,
        -labels => {
            0 => ' any',
            1 => ' one day',
            2 => ' two days',
            3 => ' three days',
            4 => ' four days',
            5 => ' one week',
        }
    ),
[download]

But neither of these is quite right. The first is too cludgy in translating from submitted values to initialisation values; the seconde uses all the CGI.pm magic, but it's a two step, and it involves sending large chunks of html to HTML::Template which... feels a bit wrong. Left to my own devices I'd go with method two as the lesser evil, but I wonder if there is a cleaner way - either some clever HTML::Template wheeze, or a different templating system or... TIMTOWTDI???

§ George Sherston

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