Perl variable set from query string not available in subroutine (available in some subroutines!)

Question

Perl has beaten me down good today and I have a question. I'm accessing a perl script via a link from another perl script. agent.pl?agentid=40

In the agent.pl script I'm using the displaying the query string without issues in two different ways:

my $thatagent = $q->param('agentid');
$form{agentid}

I set the lexical variable at the beginning of my script of outside of all subroutine. I then use $thatagent to display the agent id number in the "default" subroutine which displays HTML when the script runs. I don't have any issues here.

$dbh->{AutoCommit} = 0;

my $q = CGI->new;

my $thatagent = $q->param('agentid');

my %form = $q->Vars;



if (! $q->param("savebtn")) {
&ViewAgent();
exit;
}

&UpdateAgent();

I call two subroutines from the viewagent subroutine and use $form{agentid} in select statements also without issue.

my $sth = $dbh->prepare("select a.name, a.paidcommission, a.paidreferral, paddy.address1, paddy.address2, paddy.city, paddy.state, paddy.zipcode, maddy.address1, maddy.address2, maddy.city, maddy.state, maddy.zipcode, bc.name, bc.phonenumber, bc.phoneext, bc.phonenumber2, bc.phoneext2, bc.fax, bc.email, sc.name, sc.phonenumber, sc.phoneext, sc.phonenumber2, sc.phoneext2, sc.fax, sc.email from agent a inner join entity e on entityid = agentid inner join address paddy on paddy.addressid = physicaladdressid inner join address maddy on maddy.addressid = mailingaddressid inner join contact bc on bc.contactid = billingcontactid inner join contact sc on sc.contactid = salescontactid where a.agentid = $form{agentid};") or die "prepare statement failed: $DBI::errstr\n";

and

my $sth = $dbh->prepare("select agentid, note, createdt, createuser from agentnote where agentid = $form{agentid};") or die "prepare statement failed: $DBI::errstr\n";

Then comes the problem, I call another subroutine (&updateagent listed above) globally and attempt to use $thatagent but it fails. If I hard code a number, it works just fine.

sub UpdateAgent {


my $sth = $dbh->prepare("UPDATE agent SET name=?, paidcommission=?, paidreferral=?    WHERE agentid=?;") or die "prepare statement failed: $DBI::errstr\n";

$sth->execute($form{'name'}, $form{'paidcommission'}, $form{'paidreferral'}, $thatagent) or die "prepare statement failed: $DBI::errstr\n";

$sth->finish;

}

I feel I must have some sort of disconnect with my subroutine "seeing" the rest of my script but am unsure. Please help!

Thanks in advance :)

Is the subroutine defined after the declaration of the variable? — choroba
– choroba, Commented Mar 6, 2013 at 23:34
Please reduce the code to the minimum necessary to reproduce the error and post that. — ikegami
– ikegami, Commented Mar 6, 2013 at 23:44

ysth · Accepted Answer · 2013-03-06 23:40:28Z

2

I'm guessing you are running this script under some kind of system such as mod_perl, where the .pl file gets compiled into a subroutine that is called as needed. The actual code ends up looking like this:

sub invoke_agent_pl {
    ...
    my $thatagent = ...;
    ...

    sub updateagent {
        ...
        # do something with $thatagent
        ...
    }
}

What happens here is that the $thatagent variable used by updateagent isn't always the same as the $thatagent variable set by the automatically created wrapper invoke_agent_pl.

The easiest fix is to say our $thatagent, not my. Better is to not use what are essentially global variables in your script.

answered Mar 6, 2013 at 23:40

ysth

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2 Comments

kyle Over a year ago

I'm just running it locally with apache, perl and mysql. I tried using our already :-(

ysth Over a year ago

then: show your apache configuration that tells it how to run .pl files; show a stripped down runnable example that demonstrates the problem.

kyle · Accepted Answer · 2013-03-07 02:13:23Z

0

OK, so I added

my @thatagent = split(/=/,$ENV{'QUERY_STRING'});

my $thatagent = $thatagent[1];

and it kept the variable throughout the script.

I don't know a whole lot about Perl, but man that seems weird. Like I said, in the initial subroutine displaying the HTML (and the two subroutines called from the HTML subroutine) I was able to use

$form{agentid}

from where I read my cgi parameters into a hash without issue.

edited Mar 7, 2013 at 2:13

answered Mar 7, 2013 at 0:47

kyle

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