From: Cere Davis <cere@...>
Date: 2004-06-12T06:01:22+09:00
Subject: Re: cgi maintaining state information

  Ah, I think I understand your point here.  And there is any easy way 
to make the form fields represent what is being posted in.
This is not so easy for checkboxes and radio buttons though.  It seems 
that in the case where a users wants this type of behavior
there should be some kind of option to at least allow the checkboxes to 
show up as checked if the attribute value is true.


>> You are asking the CGI module to automatically retain the selected value attribute passed as a parameter into the new form? Why should it? It may be a completely different form, where the name has other semantics.
>> The CGI API requires the selected value to be explicitly given, which is the correct and safe way to do it. (Your suggestion reminded me of PHP and the automatically mapping to globals variables it used to have.)



  >> However, there is nothing stopping you from writing your own 
modifications to the cgi module doing what you want. (I.e. all default 
values are taken from the input parameters if nil.) But please 
understand that this means that _default_ values in your form may be 
from external sources and thus dangerous!


  I don't think there is anything inherently dangerous about making a 
forms physical appearence update to represent the values that are posted 
in as long as no javascript type action is taken on valus submitted to 
the form by default.  It what you do with those values afterwards that 
matters.

  Actually, I am working on this but but I am new to this and am trying 
figuring out how to override a function in the cgi library at the moment....


I have a thing like:

class CGI

def checkbox((name = "", value = nil, checked = nil)
		
		....stuff in place of the default behavior of cgi.rb checkbox

	end
end

But my code doesn't seem to recognize this overriden function.  Does 
anyone know how I can override functions like this?

Thanks,
-Cere