Home » Tip Bank » Application Design » User Interface Design » Web UI

Language: Perl
Expertise: Beginner

Aug 16, 2004

Most Web-based Perl applications use more than five .cgi Perl scripts. Instead of typing all the DBI information in the script, I created a function you can use that gets the information from a .dat file on the server, and parses it for the DBI.

It's much more secure, since you're not hand-typing DB login information on the script.

Here is the package script:

################ connectsql.pl #####################################################3
#!c:/perl/bin/perl.exe

package connectsql;

use Exporter;
our @ISA = qw (Exporter);
our @EXPORT = qw (connectsql $config{'dbUser'} $config{'dbServer'} $config{'dbPass'} $config
{'datasource'});


sub connectsql
{
use DBI; 

our $a; 
our $b; 
our $c; 
our $d; 
our %config; 


open FILE, "config.dat" or die "Can not open file.txt $!\n"; 

while (<FILE>) { 
   chomp;   
   ($a,$b,$c,$d) = split(/:/); 
} 

$config{'dbServer'} = $b; 
$config{'dbUser'} = $a; 
$config{'dbPass'} = $d; 
$config{'dbName'} = $c; 
$config{'dataSource'} = "DBI:mysql:$config{'dbName'}:$config{'dbServer'}"; 

our $dbh = DBI->connect($config{'dataSource'},$config{'dbUser'},$config{'dbPass'}) || die"error";
 	
	 
}

Now, all you need to do is add this to your code before the DBI connection:

....
...
....

require "connectsql.pl";
&connectsql::connectsql();
my $dbh = DBI->connect($connectsql::config{'dataSource'},$connectsql::config
{'dbUser'},$connectsql::config{'dbPass'}) || die"error"; 	

....
....
....

The config.dat file is easy:

################config.dat###############
username:host:databasename:password: