CGI.pm input vs textfield

avik has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Dear Monks, I guess, I don't expect CGI pm to act this way, but maybe I'm missing something. Is textfield function doing something totally weird on HTML it emits? Please take a look at following code... Thanks.

use warnings;
use strict;
use CGI qw(-no_xhtml :standard *table *Tr );

print header, start_html, start_form, start_table;

print "CGI.pm Version: $CGI::VERSION";

print hr;

print h5("HTML Input tag based counter increments");
print input({type => 'text',
             name => 'val',
             value => param('val') + 10 });

print hr;

print h5("CGI.pm  textfield based counter fails to increment");

print textfield({type => 'text',
                 name => 'val2',
                 value => param('val2') + 10 });

print submit();
print end_table, end_form, end_html;
[download]

Comment on CGI.pm input vs textfield Download Code

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Re: CGI.pm input vs textfield by blokhead (Monsignor) on Jun 23, 2004 at 19:08 UTC
You need to add `force => 1` to the `textfield`. `input` is one of CGI.pm's "dumb" tag creation methods. None of the attributes you pass ("type", "name", "value") have any special meaning -- it just generates the HTML blindly. You can even write things like this: it's all the same to the `input` method: `input({ foo => "bar", blok => "head" }); # <input foo="bar" blok="head" />` [download] `textfield`, on the other hand, is a "smart" tag creation method with special logic. Some attributes you pass in now have special meaning. The kicker is that it inteprets the "value" attribute as merely a default (In fact, you can use "default" as an alias for "value"). So unless you tell it otherwise (with `force => 1`), it will act as a "sticky" form and take the new value for that field from the query string. blokhead	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: CGI.pm input vs textfield by ishnid (Monk) on Jun 24, 2004 at 13:18 UTC
If you want to turn off sticky forms on all fields (as setting `force => 1` for each field can get irritating if your form is large), you can do it in the `use` statement `use CGI qw(-no_xhtml :standard table Tr -nosticky);` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^3: CGI.pm input vs textfield by avik (Novice) on Jun 24, 2004 at 19:17 UTC
Tried `-nosticky` it makes no difference. Now `force => 1` does make it work "as expected". To me, `force => 1` needs to be a default behaviour. Thanks for your good advice.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: CGI.pm input vs textfield by bassplayer (Monsignor) on Jun 23, 2004 at 17:22 UTC
I don't believe that there is a 'type' attribute for the `textfield()` method. 'text' is the only type of `<input>` widget that `textfield()` creates. Here is a link that offers more info. bassplayer	[reply] [d/l] [select]