passing a hashref in a form?

[EdwardsMike]

Me again. So my application boils down to a user uploading a zip archive, displaying details of the contents, optionally making changes and saving to a new file. I have the display part working by passing a hashref to the template, but when it comes to saving edits, I am having trouble passing that hashref in the edit form. I tried passing it as a hidden field, but that doesn't seem to work. I suppose I could generate hidden fields for every key in the hash, but I'm guessing there's a better way to do it?

[guest20]

If you're just using regular old <form method=post s, turning each key in the hash-ref into a hidden input is a perfectly fine thing to do.

It does come with downsides: you really can only edit a one level hash with regular browser input forms.

On the plus side, you can use Mojolicious::Validator on all the values in the form

[guest20]

Mojolicious::Plugin::TagHelpers's hidden_field in a for loop...

%= form_for 'edit-thing', begin
% for (@{ $field_names }) { # you have to pass this list to the template
  %= hidden_field $_, $hash->{$_} 
% }
% end

There might be a pretty way to do it, but this'd get'er done

[EdwardsMike]

so basically I need to create a bunch of hidden fields after all? I thought there would be a magic mojo way to just pass the hashref itself through...

[guest20]

Since it's not the 90s anymore, you likely just want to have it as an object in JS and AJAX it to your backend as json...

but if you want to do it by regular form posts, just sticking it in hidden fields is the way to go

[EdwardsMike]

It's not the 90s anymore but we're still using Perl lol. I obv am not up on the framework details but assumed there was a way to do it within Mojo without involving stuff like JS or AJAX. I appreciate the time you took to respond tho...

[guest20]

Ok, yeah - that's fair, I guess it's still a little bit the 90s.

[Grinnz]

JSON is just a string, so if you encode the hashref to JSON, you can pass it as a string value into a template or through a form. If you don't need the form to do anything with individual values this seems easiest. (Use from_json/to_json not encode_json/decode_json for this purpose since the request and response transport will handle UTF-8 encoding.)

[EdwardsMike]

I started down this road, but soon realized I didn't need the full set of values that were passed (or rather, that my original plan wasn't going to work for other reasons). All I needed were the form inputs and could get them into a hashref with $self->req->params->to_hash in the controller.