Catalyst::Plugin::Params::Nested - Nested form parameters (ala Ruby on Rails).

    use Catalyst qw/Params::Nested/;

    # using this html

    <form ...>
        <!-- can be with either subscripted or dot notation -->
        <input name="foo[bar]" ... />
        <input name="foo.gorch" ... />
    </form>

    # turns params into hashrefs:

    $c->req->param('foo')->{bar};

    $c->req->params({
        # extra params
        foo => {
            bar => ...,
            gorch => ...
        },

        # original params untouched
        'foo[bar]' => ...,
        'foo.gorch' => ...,
    });

Ruby on Rails has a nice feature to create nested parameters that help with the organization of data in a form - parameters can be an arbitrarily deep nested structure.

The way this structure is denoted is that when you construct a form the field names have a special syntax which is parsed.

This plugin supports two syntaxes:

dot notation

    <input name="foo.bar.gorch" />

subscript notation

    <input name="foo[bar][gorch]" />

When reading query parameters from $c->req you can now access the all the items starting with "foo" as one entity using $c->req->param('foo');. Each subitem, denoted by either the dot or the square brackets, will be returned as a further deeper hashref.

prepare_parameters

Overrides prepare_parameters in Catalyst to expand the parameter data structure post factum.

No attempt is made to merge data intelligently. If you do this:

    <input name="foo" />
    <input name="foo.bar" />

the foo parameter will stay untouched, and you'll have to access foo.bar using its full string name:

    $c->req->param("foo.bar");

Yuval Kogman, nothingmuch@woobling.org

Jess Robinson

        Copyright (c) 2005 the aforementioned authors. All rights
        reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute
        it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

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