I am using the most excellent Test::WWW::Mechanize::CGIApp to test my web application, and I appear to have run into a snag.

I want to set some values in a form, but since the form values are stored in a hash, the values that I set may be superceded by the default values. So my plan was to get all of the form's key/value pairs and copy everything over to a new list, except for the keys that I want to change.

I did this by getting the form from Mech, then extracting the key/value pairs from the form .. 

my $form = $mech->form_number(1);
my @keyValuePairs = $form->form();

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.. then I looped through the key/value pairs, transferring over everything except the fields I'm going to be monkeying with .. 
my @newKeyValuePairs;
my %testFields =
    ('p_customer' => 1, 'p_name' => 1, 'new_users' => 1);
while (@keyValuePairs) {

    my ($key, $value) =
        (shift @keyValuePairs, shift @keyValuePairs);
    push (@newKeyValuePairs, $key, $value)
          unless (exists($testFields{$key}));
}

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.. and finally I used Mech's set_fields method to set the form's fields. 
$mech->set_fields(
    @newKeyValuePairs,
    p_customer => 'Internal',
    p_name     => $thisProject,
    new_users  =>
    join ("\n", @{$newProjects{$thisProject}}),
);

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This produced the following errors: 

Input 'rm' is readonly at /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.8/WWW/Mechani
+ze.pm line 1233
Input 'member' is readonly at /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.8/WWW/Mec
+hanize.pm line 1233
Input 'p_id' is readonly at /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.8/WWW/Mecha
+nize.pm line 1233

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Is there a better way to solve this problem? I haven't tried just setting the field values -- I assume that because it's a hash, it will work sometimes and other times will not.

Update: Aha -- of course, the readonly variables are the variables that are 'hidden' in the original page. I don't feel like I'm that much closer to a solution, however.

Update 2: I have tried calling set_field without all of the cleverness shown above, and it seems to work properly .. so perhaps this effort was in vain. I certainly am learning a lot about using Test::WWW::Mechanize::CGIApp, in any case, and that's definitely a Good Thing. Thanks to all the monks who read this node.

Alex / talexb / Toronto

"Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds

In reply to Input 'foo' is readonly / WWW::Mechanize by talexb

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