autotie CGI::SSI to CGI::Application output

ryan has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I want to autotie CGI::SSI in some way to the output of my CGI::Application module.

For a normal CGI I would do the following and it would interpret any SSI tags in whatever the script outputs before it goes to the browser:

use CGI::SSI (autotie => STDOUT);
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When I try this in a CGI::Application module it reports errors about file handles such as:

Failed to copy the filehandle (ATRACK::STDOUT): Invalid argument at /u
+sr/share/perl5/CGI/SSI.pm line 74.
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I'll be the first to admit I don't know how CGI::Application handles STDOUT, or what filehandle it uses to do it's magic, do I need to autotie it to some other special file handle? I've had a look through the source for any clues, but it is beyond me. Can anyone suggest how I could achieve this or if I'm wasting my time trying?

Thanks,

Ryan

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Re: autotie CGI::SSI to CGI::Application output
by ryan (Pilgrim) on Feb 13, 2003 at 05:14 UTC

The reason for this is the HTML templates were rather 'pretty' and had a heap of nested tables in them that was just too much code to duplicate. So I wanted a way to call a function from within the template that can accept a parameter and produce the code for the table with the parameter as the title of the table.

In the end I found that HTML::Template::Expr can do this so I modified CGI::Application to use HTML::Template::Expr instead of HTML::Template and it all went well. It was just a simple substitution of the module name in two spots.

I know this is not a good use of templating technology, both I and the HTML::Template author agree there - but this particular case called for it.

The actual code in the CGI::Application module was a declaration of the template functions and their related subs:

HTML::Template::Expr->register_function(box => \&box);

sub box {
   #read in other templates to costruct table header
   #use parameters to decide if it is the start or the
   #end of the box and what title to use etc.
}
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<!-- TMPL_VAR expr="box('box-start','Table title')" -->
  table contents here
<!-- TMPL_VAR expr="box('box-end')" -->
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