I recently stumbled across DBM::Deep, which is very cool in itself, but moments ago it occurred to me that this could easily make a nice arbitrary shared data storage for Template templates. Yes, I said shared. Unlike MLDBM, this can be used safely with multiple processes. It's like magic. And, it's a single Pure-perl PM file, so you can install it on shared hosting solutions for CGI stuff.

Beware: Template considers this to be a blessed object, you can't call normal hash or array vmethods. However, you can call the export method on any part of the tree to get a normal unassociated data structure, which can then be used with normal vmethods.

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UPDATE: I've just uploaded Template::Plugin::DBM::Deep to get at all of this directly from Template, rather than having to create the structure externally. Woo hoo.

use DBM::Deep;
use Template;
my $t = Template->new(); # create engine
my $db = DBM::Deep->new(
  file => "foo.db",
  locking => 1,
  autoflush => 1,
); # create storage
...
$t->process($your_template, { db => $db });
[download]

[% db.foo = { fred => 3 barney => 2 }; # make permanent addition
db.foo.fred; # get "3"
%]
[download]