The spring of HTML::FormFu

HTML::FormFu arrived on his first major release (1.00) this christmas. It's quite an event considering that previews release was on 05 Oct 2012.

I'm very happy for that because now form rendering is better and cleaner. Problem is that this new rendering had some incompatibility with my Strehler forms (javascript and CSS) so, when I upgraded, thing went a little messed up.

The most interesting thing (the only worth to be written here) is about my little CategoryUnique validator.

Strehler backend manage a category tree that you can use to organize contents. For example:

foo
foo/bar
foo/ber
yetanothercategory
newcategory
newcategory/newson

When you create a new category you have to give its name and its parent. The CategoryUnique validator check if the category already exists under that parent.

In the example up there you can create bar under newcategory, you can't under foo, because there's already one category named that way.

So the validator can't just check about the value of the category field, but it has also  to consider the second parameter of the form, to check if the category has the same name under the same parent.

With HTML::FormFu 0.09010 it was easy:

my $self = shift;
my $parent = $self->form->param_value('partent');

Easy, yes, but apparently forbidden by documentation.

If the value is invalid or the form was not submitted, it returns undef.

In a validator a value cannot be already valid :-)

But it worked because there was a bug, a bug fixed in the December 2012.

We could exploit it just because no new release of HTML::FormFu come after that fix... until December 2013.

What can we do now, with the shiny fixed 1.00 version of the software? The only way I find to do the same thing is to use the undocumented HTML::FormFu::FakeQuery. The query method of the form, infact, doesn't return an hash as documentation still say, but an instance of this object.

Luckly, using it is easy enough:

my $self = shift;

my $query = $self->form->query();
my $parent = $query->param('parent');


without passing through the param method of the form, that HTLM::FormFu documentation itself doesn't trust.