News

12/18/2006 - FormBuilder 3.05 released! Fieldsets, Catalyst support, table-free <div> rendering (3.05 Release Notes). Happy Holidays - enjoy. Download FormBuilder 3.05.

08/31/2006 - FormBuilder 3.04 released! Several new features (3.04 Release Notes), including the inflate option to turn fields into objects on the fly, and a new prepare() method to give you complete access to FormBuilder's rendering hash, for easier integration with Catalyst. Download FormBuilder 3.04.

08/16/2006 - Catalyst FormBuilder plugin released! A new plugin adds support for FormBuilder to Catalyst. Download the plugin here. If you haven't checked out Catalyst, you should - it's a real contender to Ruby on Rails.

05/20/2006 - FormBuilder 3.0302 released! This is a bugfix release over 3.03 that mainly addresses UTF8 issues. Download FormBuilder 3.0302.

03/06/2006 - FormBuilder 3.03 released! After a long wait, FormBuilder 3.03 is here.
Check it out! There's tons of new features in the 3.03 Release Notes, including:

• Messages localization, including packaged messages for many languages
• Subclassable fields
• Data::FormValidator support for validation (thanks Peter Eichman!)
• Select field optgroup support
• Option sorting by LABELNAME or LABELNUM
• Many bugfixes

04/29/2005 - FormBuilder 3.0202 is out! Download 3.0202 here.
This is a bugfix release over the 3.02 version that came out on 04/18 with the following gooey goodness.

• Multi-page form support
• Per-field "other" and "growable" options
• Autoloadable $field() subs (via fieldsubs option)
• Ability to initialize FB from external config files
• Addition of CGI::FastTemplate template engine
• Character encoding dispatched to HTML::Entities
• Easy plug-in support for CGI::Session
• Truly subclassable template and messaging modules
• Completely compliant XHTML output (validated)

The last version of FormBuilder in the 2.x tree is 2.14 (release notes). This version is very stable, although there are a few obscure edge-cases bugs. It works back to Perl 5.004, whereas Perl 5.6.0 or later is needed for the 3.x series.

Introduction

#!/usr/bin/perl

use CGI::FormBuilder;

@fields = qw(first_name last_name email phone mailing_list);

$form = CGI::FormBuilder->new(
             method => 'post',
             fields => \@fields,
             validate => {
                email => 'EMAIL',    # validate fields using
                phone => 'PHONE',    # built-in patterns
             },
             required => 'ALL',
        );

# add options to our mailing list field 
$form->field(name => 'mailing_list',
             options => [qw/Subscribe Unsubscribe/]);

if ($form->submitted) {
    # you would write code here to act on the form data
    $fname = $form->field('first_name');
    $lname = $form->field('last_name');

    print $form->confirm(header => 1);
} else {
    print $form->render(header => 1);
}