Pgreet - General purpose shared methods for Penguin Greetings.
$Pg_obj = new Pgreet($Pg_config, $Pg_error, 'daemon');
$Pg_obj->store_state($data_hash_ref, $Complete_path_to_StateFilName);
$data_hash_ref = $Pg_obj->read_state($data_hash_ref,
$Complete_path_to_StateFilName
);
The Perl module: Pgreet (Pgreet.pm)
provides shared functionality for the Penguin
Greetings application that is not provided by any
specific submodule. Presently, it provide consistent access to
the intermediate state files between the CGI Application and
Penguin Greetings daemon.
This module depends on the Pgreet::Error and
Pgreet::Config modules to provide error handling
and configuration information respectively. The normal
initialization sequence would be to first create a Penguin
Greetings configuration object and then a Penguin Greetings
error object using declarations similar to what is shown
below:
$Pg_config = new Pgreet::Config($config_file)
$Pg_error = new Pgreet::Error($Pg_config, 'CGIApp');
Once these two objects exist, the Pgreet object may be
constructed. The required arguments are the Penguin Greetings
config object (below $Pg_config,) the Penguin
Greetings error object (below $Pg_error,) and the
type of application that is creating the Pgreet object. There
are three recognized types: daemon (for a
application daemon like pgreetd,) CGIApp
(for a CGI application, Speedy CGI application, etc. like
pgreet.pl.cgi,) and App (for a command
line application like PgTemplateTest.) These are used
to determine how input/output will be dealt with for
example.
$Pg_obj = new Pgreet($Pg_config, $Pg_error, 'CGIApp');
There are two methods in Pgreet. They provide a
consistent interface to reading and writing the temporary state
files used to communicate between the CGI application and the
system daemon. To store data, use the store_state
method. It takes a hash reference of items to store and
complete path to a file.
$Pg_obj->store_state($data_hash_ref, $Complete_path_to_StateFilName);
To retrieve data from a state file, use the method
read_state. It takes the same two arguments: a
hash reference and the path to the file to read. The method
returns the hash reference so that it may be called in a more
functional-programming style if desired (shown below.)
$data_hash_ref = $Pg_obj->read_state($data_hash_ref,
$Complete_path_to_StateFilName
);
Because errors are handled by the Penguin Greetings Error object, these methods will not return error conditions but will produce error conditions consistent with the Error object.
The state file format is very simple minded. Items are in a key-data format that is tab-delimited. All tabs in the data is converted to spaces to avoid ambiguity. The only exception (and the reason for these special methods) is the message text of the ecard. It is listed separately line by line. The reason for this special handing is limitations in the length of fields in other implementations of state file transition. An example of a state file is shown below
# pgreet intermediate state file - autogenerated. # Created on: Fri Jul 25 10:27:53 2003 recipient_email user@miscserver.org password testpassword copy_for_you yes recipient_name Jane & John Doe sender_name Jane & John Doe sender_email user@miscserver.org card St_Gabriel_new_day site PgSaint state_file pgreet-state-84760f0946f1ead86770d156e3ac4e7f.txt EOV MESSAGE: This is a test message. This is a test message. This is a test message. This is a test message.
The line EOV indicates that all tab-separated
values have been provided. The next line MESSAGE:
is the start of the message text. The message text continues
until the end of the file.
Copyright (c) 2003-2005 Edouard Lagache
This software is released under the GNU General Public License, Version 2. For more information, see the COPYING file included with this software or visit: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
No known bugs at this time.
Edouard Lagache <pgreetdev@canebas.org>
1.0.0
the Pgreet::Config manpage, the Pgreet::Error manpage, the Pgreet::CGIUtils manpage