Learning Perl, Second Edition

19.7. Other Form Elements

Now that you know how to create simple text fields in your form and respond to them, you're probably wondering how to make the other kinds of widgets you've seen, like buttons, checkboxes, and menus.

Here's a more elaborate version of our program. We've thrown in some new widgets: popup menus, a submit button (named "order"), and a button to reset the entire form, erasing all user input. Popup menus are pretty much just what they say they are, but the arguments given to popup_menu may perplex you until you've read the following Section 19.7.1. The textfield() function creates a text-input field with the indicated name. We'll give more details about this function when describing the guestbook program later in this chapter.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w # cgi-bin/ice_cream: program to answer and generate ice cream # order form (version 4) use strict; # enforce variable declarations and quoting use CGI qw(:standard); print header, start_html("Ice Cream Stand"), h1("Ice Cream Stand"); if (param()) { # the form has already been filled out my $who = param("name"); my $flavor = param("flavor"); my $scoops = param("scoops"); my $taxrate = 1.0743; my $cost = sprintf("%.2f", $taxrate * (1.00 + $scoops * 0.25)); print p("Ok, $who, have $scoops scoops of $flavor for \$$cost."); } else { # first time through, so present clean form print hr(); # draw a horizontal rule before the form print start_form(); print p("What's your name? ", textfield("name")); # FOR EXPLANATION ...