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Handy Perl Functions: Automatically create a form from a database table

Back after a much needed vacation with another perl code snippet. This one creates a simple form using information pulled from the structure of a database table. The form it creates is not meant to be the end product - rather it gets a lot of the "grunt work" done, and you can then edit the resulting form to change fields to drop-downs, remove fields that shouldn't be edited, etc. It will also try to guess at a decent label for each field, based on the table name.

This script uses the same get_fields() function that outlined in my previous post.

As always, I'm sure this isn't the "perfect" code, and of course it can be improved - but it does work, and may perhaps be a useful starting block for someone else...

Usage - pretty simple - run the script and give it a database table name to use. It'll spit the html back out, which you can save in a text file or whatever.


#!/usr/bin/perl

# creates a basic form from the database table specified
use DBI;

# database connection details
my $dsn = "DBI:mysql:database=[YOUR DATABASE];host=localhost";
$dbh = DBI->connect($dsn,"root","");
my $qry = "";
my $html = "";

my $table = $ARGV[0];
if (not $table) {
       print "Please specify a table...\n";
       exit;
       }

my @fields = &get_fields($table);

$html = "
<form action="\[YOUR PROCESSING SCRIPT]\" method="\post\">
<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0">\n";

foreach $_ (@fields) {
       my $ucfield = uc $_;
       my $name = ucfirst $_;
       $name =~ s/_/ /g;

       $html .= "
       <tbody><tr valign="\top\">
               <td align="\right\"><b>$name</b></td>
               <td><input name="\$_\" value="\-$ucfield-\" type="\text\"></td>
       </tr>\n";
       }

$html .= "
<tr>
       <td colspan="2" align="\center\"><input value="\Submit\" type="\submit\"></td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
</form>\n";

print $html;
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