Re: [htmltmpl] H-T strangeness with CGI-Session

[Cees H. <ce...@si...>]

Puneet Kishor wrote:
> The problem is thus -- I am storing only the identifying info and a 
> descriptive text. But the AofH in the Session file is showing additional 
> info that looks suspiciously like the loop_context_vars. Here is an 
> excerpt from my Session file --
> 
> "rolodex" => [{"ROLODEXVAL" => 3330,"__last__" => 0,"ROLODEXTEXT" => 
> "Puneet Kishor (My Org, Inc.)","__counter__" => undef,"__first__" => 
> 0,"__odd__" => 0,"__inner__" => 0}],

This is probably because you are passing a reference to a data structure 
to both CGI::Session and HTML::Template.  In other words they both get 
the exact in memory data structure.  HTML::Template is adding things to 
the hashes that are stored in the array ref, and CGI::Session doesn't 
save it's parameters to the session until it goes out of scope (probably 
at the end of the request) so it sees the changes that HTML::Template 
made to the data.

There are a couple of things you can do to solve it.

- Don't pass the same data structure to both CGI::Session and 
HTML::Template.  Make a copy of the data before passing it by 
dereferencing the data (see the dclone() method in the Storable module 
for copying complex data structures if you have a deep data structure).

- Or you can make CGI::Session save it's data right away by making it go 
out of scope, or calling close or flush to sync the data to the session 
store.

Although HTML::Template is causing this problem, I don't think you cna 
call it a bug.  Although many modules will make a copy of the data that 
is passed in if they intend to make any changes, that can be very 
expensive if there is a lot of data (which there tends to be when 
dealing with templates).

Cheers,

Cees