Background: Used raw DBI, CDBI, poked briefly at DBIC and now settled on Rose::DB::Object. All interfacing with web pages without any particular engine in the way/helping.

I've had a few web apps where I needed to present a list of options and show the selected option. Low volume sites, so all very easy to do with Template and something like:

<select name="whatever">
[% FOREACH option = whatever_options %]
  <option value="[% option.value %]"
  [% IF whatever == option.value %] selected="1" [% END %]>
      [% option.name %]</option>
[% END %]
</select>
[download]

Now I've hit a case where I have a <select multi="1"> dialog, so obviously the above Does Not Work.

In perl I have a list of objects representing the possible values (lets say categories), and another list representing the values selected for the current viewed object (lets say an article).

Some paths:

• Create a third list, containing the possible objects with a new method 'selected' set for the objects selected.
• Add a 'selected' method to the ::Category class and go through setting as needed before passing to Template. I don't like this as I then need to discard the list after use rather than being able to cache between requests (mod_fcgid), but seems the 'least worst'
• Set some stupidly named values like 'cat'.$catid for each category set and test in Template (uh, no)
• Really clever and overly complicated logic in Template

I *have* to generate a sane single list and pass to Template, anything else is wrong, but I'm unsure as to the best way to deal with this.

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