As others have suggested, life will be better for you when you use an array for field names, a hash for field values (keyed by the names in the array), placeholders in your sql statements, and loops to keep everything compact and non-repetitive.

Once you are enjoying the beauty of all that, you'll really want to get acquainted with a cross-platform GUI library, especially for this sort of application. It's just much nicer for a user to fill in fields in a form, and have the ability to review all the values for a record (and maybe fix one or two of them) before submitting the complete record to the database with the click of a button. Take your pick of Tk, Wx, Qt or Gtk. Even Curses would be better than your current approach.

The worst torture I can imagine for someone doing keyboard entry to a database is having to use the OP's style of irreversible, "one-field-at-a-time" sequential dialog. The likelihood of making a mistake that requires a complete start-over is so high that actually completing a single record entry becomes a daunting and maddening task.

You can find a lot of self-contained sample GUI programs here at the Monastery that use most of the libraries cited above; also, a lot of the libraries come with very nice demo programs that show you how things work, and how the code is written to do those things.

In reply to Re: DBD::mysql trouble by graff
in thread DBD::mysql trouble by vendion

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.