NAME

Changes - Changes in FormBuilder 3.0, please also see the README

COMPATIBILITY

For changes between 3.000 and 3.001, skip down to "REVISIONS".

FormBuilder 3.0 should be completely compatible with FormBuilder 2.x, with the singular exception that you can no longer use the shortcut autoload style of getting to fields:

    $form->field(name => 'category', options => \@opt);
    $form->category(options => \@opt);      # WRONG

The second form is now used to manipulate $form attributes.

INTERNALS

The internals have been completely rewritten, nearly from the ground up. All of the major functions have been split into methods, and objects have been created for the form, fields, messages, CGI params, and so on. Several new sub-modules have been created, including:

    CGI::FormBuilder::Field
    CGI::FormBuilder::Messages
    CGI::FormBuilder::Template
    CGI::FormBuilder::Template::HTML
    CGI::FormBuilder::Template::Text
    CGI::FormBuilder::Template::TT2

Many of these modules can be subclassed and overridden if desired. In addition, the template engine has been rewritten to allow "plugging in" of additional template modules, simply by specifying the name of the module to the 'template' option in new().

For more details, see the man pages for the individual modules above.

NEW FEATURES

Several new features have been added which FormBuilder 2.x could not support:

Style Sheets

Stylesheets are now generated if the stylesheet option is specified to FormBuilder. This can either be 1 to turn it on, or a full path to a style sheet to include. When used, all tags are then output with a class attribute, named styleclass plus the name of the tag:

    my $form = CGI::FormBuilder->new(
                    fields => [qw/name email/],
                    styleclass => 'myFB',   # default is "fb_"
                    stylesheet => 1,        # turn on style
               );
                
    print $form->render;

    # HTML will include
    #   <input class="myFBname" id="name" name="name" type="text" />
    #   <input class="myFBemail" id="email" name="email" type="text" />

Compliant XHTML

The output should be fully-compliant XHTML finally. Really. Maybe.

Attributes and Field Objects

Individual accessors have been added for every attribute that FormBuilder maintains. For example, here's a snippet of code to demonstrate:

    if ($form->stylesheet) {
        # loop thru fields, changing class
        for ($form->fields) {
            next if /_date$/;   # skip fields named "XXX_date"

            # each field is a stringifiable object with accessors
            if ($_->options) {
                # has options
                $_->class('my_opt_style');
            } else {
                # plain text box
                $_->class('my_text_style');
            }
        }
    }

This code checks to see if the stylesheet property has been set on the main $form. If so, then it loops thru all the fields, skipping those named XXX_date. Of the remaining fields, those that have options have their class attribute changed to my_opt_style, and those without options have it set to my_text_style.

In addition, you can individually render every part of the form yourself. by calling the appropriate method. For example:

    print $form->header;      # just the header
    print $form->script;      # opening JavaScript
    print $form->title;       # form title
    print $form->start;       # opening <form> tag
    for ($form->fields) {
        print $_->label;      # each field's human label
        print $_->tag;        # each field's <input> tag
    }
    print $form->end;         # closing </form> tag

For a complete list of accessors, see the documentation for both CGI::FormBuilder and CGI::FormBuilder::Field.

Messages

Some messages have been reworded to make it easier to change just a single message, and a couple new messages were added as well:

     js_noscript             <p><font color="red"><b>Please enable JavaScript or
                             use a newer browser.</b></font></p>

     form_required_text      <p>Fields that are %s highlighted %s are required.</p>
     form_required_opentag   <b>
     form_required_closetag  </b>

     form_invalid_text       <p>%s error(s) were encountered with your submission.
                             Please correct the fields %s highlighted %s below.</p>
     form_invalid_opentag    <font color="red"><b>
     form_invalid_closetag   </font></b>

     js_invalid_default      - You must enter a valid value for the "%s" field
     form_invalid_default    You must enter a valid value

For more details, see CGI::FormBuilder::Messages.

HTML::Entities encoding

HTML character encoding is now dispatched to HTML::Entities, if available. This can be downloaded as part of the HTML::Parser module set on CPAN.

Documentation

Documentation has been updated and somewhat reorganized, which was long overdue.

BUGFIXES

3.001

    - fixed major problems with keepextras, including a reversed ismember test
    - added debug messages to keepextras and changed a few other debugs
    - added patch from Peter Eichman to fix scalar $field->tag and $field->tag_value
    - converted most all XHTML generation methods to only returning scalars
    - fixed the columns option which was totally broken for radio buttons
    - added a feature to plop in {border => 0} in columns as well
    - added the 2.x 'override' alias for field() 'force' which was missing
    - also added a 'defaults' alias for field() 'value' for CGI.pm happiness
    - more tests since there were way too many bugs
    - a ton of documentation cleanup, these docs used to suck

3.000

    - many edge-case 2.x bugs, such as field(value => '')

AUTHOR

Copyright (c) 2000-2005 Nathan Wiger, Sun Microsystems <nate@sun.com>. All Rights Reserved.

This module is free software; you may copy this under the terms of the GNU General Public License, or the Artistic License, copies of which should have accompanied your Perl kit.

cpanm CGI::FormBuilder

perl -MCPAN -e shell
install CGI::FormBuilder