Your use of a hash to define your fields leaves a bit of a dilemma: you never know what order they will be in when you invoke keys. This means you have given perl control over the order the fields appear in the form. You'd be better off using an array.

Instead of storing the field type, store a code reference to a subroutine that can generate that type of tag. The sub can take arguments to control creation of the input field.

use CGI qw(:standard);

sub TEXTFIELD {
    my ($name,$siz,$max)=@_;
    $siz ||= 50;
    $max ||= 80;
    return textfield(-name=>$name,-size=>$siz,-maxlength=>$max);
}

sub TEXTAREA { ...generate a textarea... };
sub SUBMIT { ...generate a submit button... };

my @fields = (
    { type=>\&TEXTFIELD, args=>['name'] },
    { type=>\&TEXTFIELD, args=>['email'] },
    { type=>\&TEXTFIELD, args=>['site name'] },
    { type=>\&TEXTFIELD, args=>['description'] },
    { type=>\TEXTAREA, args=>['comments'] },
);

my @rows;
for (@fields) {
    my $control = $_->{type}->(@{$_->{args}});
    push @rows,td({-align=>left,-valign=>TOP},$control);
}

[download]
---
print map { my ($m)=1<<hex($_)&11?' ':'';
$m.=substr('AHJPacehklnorstu',hex($_),1) }
split //,'2fde0abe76c36c914586c';

[download]

In reply to Re: Generalising Forms from CGI.pm by pfaut
in thread Generalising Forms from CGI.pm by Cody Pendant

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.