Creating a Multiple Choice quiz System, Part 3

The part of edit-quiz.pl that handles saving information is invoked via POST, when the user clicks on the submit button at the bottom of the page. At this point, the HTML form elements are sent to edit-quiz.pl and made available using the param method from CGI.pm.

So when edit-quiz.pl is invoked using POST, we simply need to do the following:

The simplest way to do this is to loop through all of the possible elements. We know how many elements might exist, thanks to the $MAX_QUESTIONS global variable. Thus, we can do something like:

my $counter = 0;
foreach $counter (0 .. $MAX_QUESTIONS)
{
   # Add question number $counter
}

Adding a new question is now accomplished by using the addQuestion method from within QuizQuestions. Once we create an instance of QuizQuestions, we can add a new question by invoking the method, and passing it the question text, the possible answers, and the correct answer as arguments. Given the names of our HTML form elements are regular, we can expand the above loop as:

# Create an instance of QuizQuestions
my $questions = new QuizQuestions($quizname);
# Add questions to $questions
my $counter = 0;
foreach $counter (1 .. $MAX_QUESTIONS)
{
   # Only handle as many questions as were filled
   # in, by
   # checking to see if the question was entered
   last unless ($query->param("question-$counter")
         ne "$counter");
   # Set the question
   my @question =
                ($query->param("question-$counter"),
                $query->param("answer-a-$counter"),
                $query->param("answer-b-$counter"),
                $query->param("answer-c-$counter"),
                $query->param("answer-d-$counter"),
                $query->param("correct-$counter"));
   # Add the question to the quiz
   $questions->addQuestion(@question);
}

Now that you have seen how the heart of edit-quiz.pl works, take a look at the entire program in Listing 2. As you can see, it did not take many modifications to make this program work. That's because the bulk of the work is done by objects already created. CGI.pm takes care of reading the HTML form elements and handing them to us in a nicely packaged format, while QuizQuestions.pm takes care of loading and saving the questions from the quiz file. Now we don't have to get our hands dirty. (And neither do our users, who can now create quizzes without having to worry about formatting issues.)

I have also done a bit of reshuffling with the original segments of edit-quiz.pl, such that we always see the results of our editing work and can make additional changes to the quiz. This is somewhat better than the standard Web interface, in which saving also means quitting. Here, there isn't any real exit button, since saving brings you back to where you were.

There are a few minor problems with the current versions of these programs. In particular, it is potentially dangerous for a user to enter a pair of quotation marks ("") inside one of the text fields. A browser might have difficulties determining which quotation marks belong to the string and which set the string's boundaries. (However, Netscape 3.0 on my Linux box appears to handle this just fine, much to my surprise.)

Although we forget it most of the time, we continue to be haunted by our old friend the tab character, which still separates the fields in our quiz file. If a user were to enter a tab into one of the text fields in our quiz editor, the quiz file's format would be damaged and would cause problems. A solution to this would involve iterating through each of the HTML form elements handed to us by CGI.pm and removing any tabs. Better yet, we could replace them with spaces.

Notes

Next month, we will look at hybrid templates that you can create with HTML and Perl, thanks to the magic of the Text::Template module. By embedding programs inside of HTML files, we can include both static HTML and programming elements. This can be a great advantage when you want to produce output using a program, but don't want to lock the HTML styling inside of a program, since your site's editors and designers will eventually want to change the content and style of the program's output.