[Mason] comp_root and a CGI handler

[Shane M. <sh...@ap...>]

I have had this problem for a couple of years, and been ignoring it.  
Now it is really really biting me in the butt.  I have a collection of 
mason components that work via either CGI or mod_perl under Apache and 
elsewhere. At installation time, the user can choose where to put this 
tree.  What I cannot figure out is what to set component root to. 

What I had always assumed is that comp_root should be set to the path to 
the top of the tree, since that is where the autohandler and all of the 
top level components live.  However, if that directory happens to be NOT 
at the top of the apache Document_Root, it doesn't work.  What I see is 
something like this:

could not find component for initial path '/utshare/atm/error_report.mpl'

Stack:
  [/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.1/HTML/Mason/Request.pm:166]
  [/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.1/Class/Container.pm:194]
  [/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.1/Class/Container.pm:257]
  [/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.1/HTML/Mason/Interp.pm:213]
  [/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.1/HTML/Mason/Interp.pm:207]
  [/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.1/HTML/Mason/CGIHandler.pm:127]
  [/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.1/HTML/Mason/CGIHandler.pm:76]
  [/home/httpd/html/utshare/atm/cgi_handler.pl:72]

That is with a Document_Root of /home/httpd/html/ and a component_root 
of /home/httpd/html/utshare/atm/.  My CGI handler has a block that looks 
like this:
my $h = new HTML::Mason::CGIHandler(
      comp_root=>$Framework::topDir,
      allow_globals => [qw($userInfo $H)],
      data_dir=>"$Framework::topDir/mason",
      error_mode=>'fatal',
      error_format => 'text');

eval { $h->handle_request } ;

Where Framework::topDir is set to the path mentioned above.

So - what am I missing here?  Clearly the handle_request method that is 
being called by the CGI script needs to turn the requested path into 
something relative to the component root, but I don't see how that is 
supposed to happen.  Help?

-- 
Shane P. McCarron                          Phone: +1 763 786-8160 x120
Managing Director                            Fax: +1 763 786-8180
ApTest Minnesota                            Inet: sh...@ap...