Okay, just wanted to thank everybody for their help. This is truely the great thing about the Perl community. Below is my final code, which now works as I had hoped. I changed the data structure to be hash of hash as suggested. It's a lot clearer.

%sample = 
{
  'short' =>{name=>"Job ID",
         width=>40,
         cgi=>{method=>'textfield',field=>'short',size=>15,max=>10},
         div=>"center"},
       
  'name' =>{name=>"Job Name",
        width=>150,
        cgi=>{method=>'textfield',field=>'name',size=>35}}
}; 

foreach (keys %sample)
    {
    $method = $sample{$_}{'cgi'}{'method'};
    # if method doesn't exist, you get undef sub error in CGI pm
    if ($method)
      {
      print $q->$method(-name=>$job{$_}{'cgi'}{'field'},
                -default=>$job{$_}{'cgi'}{'default'},
                -size=>$job{$_}{'cgi'}{'size'},
                -maxlength=>$job{$_}{'cgi'}{'max'}
               );
      }
    print "\n";
    }
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--
Filmo the Klown