Who is this for
This articles is for those who want to learn how to generate dynamic HTML
pages based on database information
What you should know Basic Perl programming How the DBI Module and CGI modules work
Introduction
CGI is one of the ways that a site can generate dynamic HTML (DHTML) pages.
These pages can contain simple information like the current date, or these
can contain information taken directly from a database.
Use-ing Modules
To generate DHTML pages from a database, you will need two modules:
DBI and the optional CGI modules. The DBI module is used to access the database
while the CGI module assists you in generating your HTML page. To make things
easier for you, I would suggest that you include the CGI module in your script.
Basic Assumptions
To help us in our topic, we will assume that we want to generate
a page that lists all the people registered to our site.
- We will extract the Name column from the members table of the registration database.
- We will also assume that we are using a MySQL database.
- The database user is sample and the password is pwdsample.
Generating HTML code
Now that we have a template to read the database, the next thing
to solve is to generate the HTML code to display the records. We do this using
the CGI module.
To generate the HTML code, we
need to first generate the header and then generate the HTML portion.
use CGI;
use strict;
my $c = new CGI;
print $c->header,
$c->start_html();
Getting the Records
Next, we have to do is to write a code that will: connect to the database
prepare and execute the SQL statement to read the database records we need
read the results of the SQL statement. To simplify things, we will use the
fetchrow_array method of the DBI module. As we read each row from the database,
we will display the row on the HTML page. To do this, we will have to code
this:
use DBI;
# Connect to the Database
my $db = DBI->connect(
'DBI:mysql:database=registration:host=localhost',
'sample',
'pwdsample');
# prepare SQL statement
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