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

I've inheritted a CGI application which I think is a good fit for CGI::Application as it has a lot of "page" states.

Unfortunately these pages are currently called by different parameters - rather than one.

For example I have the following requests:

?page=top
?stats=1
?new=1

Rather than the CGI::Application-styled single run mode:

?mode=stats
?mode=article
?mode=new

Given that I wish all the old historical links to work, is there a way of shoe-horning CGI::Application to work with these parameters? Or would I be better off sticking with my current dispatch-table styled approach?

(I guess I could use mod_rewrite to coerce things, but that seems like the worst of both worlds)

Steve
---
<a href="http://www.steve.org.uk/">steve.org.uk</a> : <a href="http://www.debian-administration.org/">Debian System Administration</a>

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Converting to CGI::Application
by PodMaster (Abbot) on May 14, 2005 at 10:05 UTC
    No shoehorning required, just write your setup accordingly, something like the following would work 
    sub setup {
    my $self = shift;
    my $cgi = $self->query;

    $cgi->param('mode','stats')
        if $cgi->param('stats');

    ...
}

    [download]

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    I run a Win32 PPM repository for perl 5.6.x and 5.8.x -- I take requests (README).
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Re: Converting to CGI::Application
by mpeters (Chaplain) on May 14, 2005 at 23:22 UTC
    All of the other responses have been good, but for another (and IMHO, a more C::A) way...
    I would use the mode_param() accessor that can also take an anonymous sub.
    sub setup {
  my $self = shift;
  $self->mode_param(\&_translate_old);
}

sub _translate_old {
  my $self = shift;
  my $query = $self->query();
  if( $query->param('page') {
    return $query->param('page');
  } elsif ( $query->param('stats') }
    return 'stats';
  } elsif( $query->param('new') {
    return 'new';
  }
}

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Re: Converting to CGI::Application
by derby (Abbot) on May 14, 2005 at 10:41 UTC
    In this case, I would replace the cgi script with something a bit more complicated than the normal CGI::Application wrapper. Something like this that sets the start_mode: 
    #!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use CGI;
use My::App;

my $cgi = CGI->new();
my $mode;
if( $cgi->param( 'page' ) {
    $mode = $cgi->param( 'page' );
} elsif( $cgi->param( 'stats' ) ) {
    $mode = "stats";
} elsif( $cgi->param( 'new' ) ) {
    $mode = "new";
} else {
    $mode = "some_default";
}
   
my $app = My::App->new();

$app->start_mode( $mode );
$app->run();

    [download]
    -derby

    Update: Uggg ... I like podmaster's solution much better since it appears the cgi-script is always the same. I've used the above approach - setting the start_mode in the cgi-script - when the the different modes of a multi-page cgi were different cgis (/cgi-bin/search, /cgi-bin/results, /cgi-bin/product, etc).
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