Fellow monasterians,

I'm still trying to get my head around references and was doing okay until this bit of code where I must set an HTML::Template loop with a AoH. I'm fine when I fetchall_arrayref() and set the param with the AoH reference directly:

my $branches  = $sth->fetchall_arrayref();
...
$template->param( branches => $branches );
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But when I try to build a new AoH for the purposes of the application's functionality and set that ref, I get an error of trying to set the "param with a scalar." I tried this:

my $branchaoh = \$selbranch;
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and

my $branchaoh = \@selbranch;
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after the for loops and my @selbranch; before the loops and got strict errors for both. So, question: how do I make my $selbranch an acceptable reference for H::T? Background questions: when does $selbranch become an array? a reference? Here's the whole deal:

my $stmt = "SELECT id, name FROM branches";
&execute_it; 
my $branches  = $sth->fetchall_arrayref(); 

$stmt = "SELECT branches FROM users WHERE username = '$user'";
&execute_it;
my @sqldata = $sth->fetchrow_array();
my @areas = split (/,/, $sqldata[0]);

my $selbranch;
 
foreach my $i (0 .. $#areas) {
   foreach my $j (0 .. $#$branches) {
      if ($areas[$i] == $branches->[$j]{'id'}) {
         $selbranch->[$i]{ 'value' } = $areas[$i];
         $selbranch->[$i]{ 'branch' } = $branches->[$j]{'name'};
      }
   }
}

my $template = HTML::Template -> new(filename => "../xm_dialogs/editme
+nu.tmpl");
$template->param( branches => $selbranch );

#---------------------
sub execute_it {
   $sth = $dbh->prepare($stmt) or die "prepare: $stmt: $DBI::errstr";
   $sth->execute() or die "execute: $stmt: $DBI::errstr";
}
[download]

Thanks all.