Greetings wise ones:

I just wrote a clunky application, and I want to get the community's feedback, because I don't like how I wrote it.

Background: the people I work for need a way to search, add, and edit their records of contacts at a bunch of different companies. For example, when somebody gets a new phone number, we need to be able to update our records.

Here's the overview of what I did:

• Turned the excel spreadsheet that held all the orders into an xml file.
• Wrote a search.html page that gets information from a form, and then uses perl-mason and XML::Simple to find matching records and print them.
• For any printed record, a new form appears that allows the user to fill out updated information. Then, the perl-mason code replaces the old record with the new one. This is the part that seems clunky to me.

The xml file looks sort of like this:

<records>

<record>
<uid>0001</uid>
<company_name>Acme Industries</company_name>
<contact_name>Arthur Dent</contact_name>
<contact_phone_number>867-5309</contact_phone_number>
</record>

<record>
<uid>0002</uid>
<company_name>Zeta Industries</company_name>
<contact_name>Sam Lowry</contact_name>
<contact_phone_number>555-5555</contact_phone_number>
</record>

</records>
[download]

I wrote some perl-mason pages to allow users to search records after parsing the data with XML::Simple. They can edit a record by filling out a form on the post_edits.html page. Here's what happens on the post_edits.html page:

<%init>
use XML::Simple;
my $xref = XMLin("path_to_xmlfile.xml");
my $newnode = {};
foreach my $kee ( "uid", "company_name", "contact_name",
"contact_phone_number" ) {
  $newnode->{$kee} = $ARGS{$kee};
}

foreach my $rec ( @{$xref->{record}} ) {
  if ( $rec->{'uid'} eq $newnode->{'uid'} ) {
    $rec = $newnode;
  }
}
</%init>
[download]

I pass the new edited record in the %ARGS hash. Then I create the $newnode structure which will replace the old record. Then I loop through my in-memory structure until I find the record that I want to replace, and then I replace it, with the $rec = $newnode line. I've used Data::Dumper to check that it works, and it looks good, but I can't help but wonder if there is a better way.

All comments and criticism are welcome. Let the didactic abuse flow!

update (broquaint): added missing </ul>

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