The Personnel Budget Database System includes a printable form, the Employee Personnel Report. In order to make this form accessible to perl code while maintaining flexibility, the form will provide an interface including methods that may be called through an EPRForm object. (More specifically, through a reference to such an object.)

By restricting access to these methods, we minimize memory usage, since the symbols associated with the variables and subroutines of the form's package will not be copying to the namespace of the code using the form. Methods

new

Creates a new form object and returns a reference to it.

Accepts an optional hash reference. The keys of the hash should be fieldnames, and the values should be the appropriate information for each field, for example: my $form = new EPRForm();

-- or -- my $form = new EPRForm({ 'fname' => 'Roger', 'lname' => 'Hill', 'SSN' => '259988593', });

field

Returns the value of a field, optionally setting the field first. If you provide two parameters: the fieldname and a value, the form's will remember that value for that field: $form->field("fname", "Peter");

If you only provide one parameter, the form's value for that field will be returned (or undef if there is no value for that field): my $fname = $form->field("fname");

Or just use a hash reference to set lots of fields like you can do in the constructor: $form->field({ "fname" => "Austin", "lname" => "Powers", "mname" => "Danger" });

generate_pdffile

Accepts a parameter for the filename to write to. Returns the whole pdf document as a string. This method will die with an appropriate error message, so you can trap an exception by using eval if you need to: my $pdf; eval $pdf = $form->generate_pdffile; warn "there was a problem: $@" if $@; Fieldnames Here is a listing of the fields in the form:

fname

lname

mname

fname

fname