Dropdown-Menu with optgroup - perl

Question

i am trying to create a dynamic dropdown-menu that receives its entries out of an xml-file at script-startup.
first i tried a static version like this:
Tr(td([popup_menu( -name=>'betreff', -values=>[optgroup(-name=>'Mädels',
-values=>['Susi','Steffi',''], -labels=>{'Susi'=>'Petra','Steffi'=>'Paula'})
,optgroup(-name=>'Jungs', -values=>['moe', 'catch',''])])]));
that worked fine.
The prob starts when i try to put the -values-parameter of popup_menu into a scalar variable.
Should somehow lokk similar to that one:
$popup_values = "[optgroup(-name=>'Mädels', -values=>['Susi','Steffi',''],
-labels=>{'Susi'=>'Petra','Steffi'=>'Paula'}),optgroup(-name=>'Jungs',
-values=>['moe', 'catch',''])]"
or with single quotation marks.
The goal is to build that string by concatenating the syntax-corrected elements of the xml-file. Thats because i do not know a priori how many optgroups or list elements within the optgroups will exist.
Any idea?
Thx in advance
Jochen

Answer 1

So you have an XML file which you use to generate that string? Why not directly generate the data structure necessary for the popup_menu call? It's just an array (you can call optgroup while "analysing" the XML file)
If you really want to use the string-solution then you could use eval to transform the string to the data structure. Though this solution has certain security issues.
Reading From XML-File
Here's an example of how to transform form XML to the optgroup, this of course depends on how your XML-file looks like.
use strict;
use warnings;
use XML::Simple;
use CGI qw/:standard/;
my $xmlString = join('', <DATA>);
my $xmlData = XMLin($xmlString);
my #popup_values;
foreach my $group (keys(%{$xmlData->{group}})) {
my (#values, %labels);
my $options = $xmlData->{group}->{$group}->{opt};
foreach my $option (keys(%{$options})) {
push #values, $option;
if(exists($options->{$option}->{label}) &&
'' ne $options->{$option}->{label}) {
$labels{$option} = $options->{$option}->{label};
}
}
push #popup_values, optgroup(-name => $group,
-labels => \%labels,
-values => \#values
);
}
print popup_menu(-name=>'betreff', -values=> \#popup_values);
__DATA__
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<dropdown>
<group name="Mädels">
<opt name="Susi" label="Petra"/>
<opt name="Steffi" label="Paula"/>
<opt name="" />
</group>
<group name="Jungs">
<opt name="moe" />
<opt name="catch" />
<opt name="" />
</group>
</dropdown>