Some great advice!

I have a small shop doing two things - Per/Tk for stand-alone apps for a variety of platforms - AND Perl with MySQL webb-apps and CGI.

My list of indispensable stuff includes SQL::Abstract, CGI::FormBuilder, HTML::QuickTable, HTML::Template.

I am also looking at other modules to help, CGI::Session and Apache::Session among them along with CGI::Application.

Currently I do input field validation, and a degree of untainting, by having generic subroutines that use the metadata from the MySQL database itself. Here is one attempt at a sub that returns a HASH of table information. 

sub getTableStructure {
    # need: $dbh
    #        tablename
    # returns: hash of field(column) records

    my ($dbh, $tablename) = @_;
    my %struct_hash;
    my $SQL = "SHOW COLUMNS FROM $tablename";
    my $sth = $dbh->prepare( $SQL );
    $sth->execute();
    while ( my $inphash = $sth->fetchrow_hashref() ) {
        $struct_hash{$inphash->{Field}} = $inphash->{Type};
    }
    return %struct_hash;
}

[download]
This hash can be used to look at the structure for each field and can help you automate the validation process. This code was written in a rush for a project that would have otherwise need a host of validation subs. I have to go back and clean up all of it, but maybe you get the idea of what I did.

jdtoronto

In reply to Re: Perl/CGI Database Techniques by jdtoronto
in thread Perl/CGI Database Techniques by yojimbo

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.