Embedding Perl in HTML with Mason

Chapter 11. Recipes

No, we are not going teach you how to make a delicious tofu and soybean stew. But this is almost as good. This chapter shows how to do some common Mason tasks, some of them with more than one implementation.

Sessions

For many of our session examples, we will be using the Apache::Session module. Despite its name, this module doesn’t actually require mod_perl or Apache, though that is the context in which it was born and in which it’s most often used. It implements a simple tied hash interface to a persistent object.^[22] It has one major gotcha: you must make sure that the session object gets cleaned up properly (usually by letting it go out of scope), so that it will be written to disk after each access.

Without Touching httpd.conf

Here is an example that doesn’t involve changing any of your Apache configuration settings. The following code should be placed in a top-level autohandler. Any component that needs to use the session will have to inherit from this component, either directly or via a longer inheritance chain.

It uses cookies to store the session.

<%once>
 use Apache::Cookie;
 use Apache::Session::File;
</%once>
<%init>
 my %c = Apache::Cookie->fetch;
 my $session_id =
     exists $c{masonbook_session} ? $c{masonbook_session}->value : undef;

First, it loads the necessary modules. Normally we recommend that you do this at server startup via a PerlModule directive in your httpd.conf file or in your handler.pl file to save memory, but we load them here just to show ...