I am seeking wisdom on how one would go about defining global variables for a cgi application that get their values from a database. These variables will change periodically (whenever the database values change) and they are used throughout an entire application.

The problem I am running into is that if I wait until a run mode to grab the data from the db then I must declare the global variables without a value at the top of the program. The data will usually be there for the first run mode but by the time we goto the second (or a different) run mode, then the data is blanked out again because of the global declarations with no value.

I have been able to call a seperate function below the setup function and manually define these global variables here, but I have been unsuccessful on calling it up with $self to attach to the db handle. If I could get this to work then it would probably be golden.

Thanks for any advice/help.

minimal code sample:
############################

our variable1 = 2003;
our variable2 = 2004;


sub setup{
   my $self=shift;
   $self->start_mode('start');
   $self->mode_param('rm');
   my $dbh=getDbConnection("universe");
   $self->param('dbh'=>$dbh);
      
   $self->run_modes(
      start=>\&showstart,
      search=>\&genSearchPage,
      show_type_1=>\&genShow1,
      show_type_2=>\&genShow2,
      calculate=>\&genCalculator,
      iamge=>\&generateImage
   )
}

sub showstart {

use variable1 here;
use variable2 here;

}

sub genSearchPage {

use variable1 here;
use variable2 here;


}

sub genShow1 {

use variable1 here;
use variable2 here;

}

...

etc. etc.

[download]
#########################

As you can see, right now the variable1 and variable2 are hard coded, but I want to be able to get their values from a database and then have all the subs be able to access those variables with the values from the database. Problem is that I dont connect to the database until I am in setup, so unless I manually connect again to the database at the top, I cant get a connection to the db before I run setup.

Edited by footpad, 19 December 2003: Revised HTML formatting and added <code> tags.

In reply to CGI Application and global variables (from a database) by tmaciak

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