I've been working on a script using CGI.pm for which I need the 'nosticky' option. That is:

-nosticky By default the CGI module implements a state-preserving behavior called "sticky" fields. The way this works is that if you are regenerating a form, the methods that generate the form field values will interrogate param() to see if similarly-named parameters are present in the query string. If they find a like-named parameter, they will use it to set their default values. Sometimes this isn't what you want. The -nosticky pragma prevents this behavior. You can also selectively change the sticky behavior in each element that you generate.

I've seen a number of posts here and elsewhere complaining about it, and after a few hours of frustration I finally decided to dig through the code to figure out what was going wrong. As far as I can tell, the nosticky option does almost nothing. It's only referenced by the submit method, and has no effect even there if you supply a label for the submit button. The override option, on the other hand, does work. Unfortunately, you have to pass it to every output method instead of setting it globally. I wrote up a small test script to demonstrate the problem, and I've hosted a copy here

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use CGI qw/-nosticky :standard/;

print header, html(
    start_form,
    checkbox(
        -nosticky => 1,
        -name => "checkbox",
        -label => "Broken (using nosticky)",
        -checked => 0
    ),
    br,
    checkbox(
        -override => 1,
        -name => "checkbox",
        -label => "Working (using override)",
        -checked => 0
    ),
    br,
    submit,
    end_form
);
[download]

If you check both boxes and click Submit, the second one will correctly be cleared, but the first one will stay checked. It seems really odd that a feature that's been around for so long in such a prominent module could have been broken all this time, so I still feel like I must be doing something wrong, but I can't see what it would be.

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