[Catalyst] Uniform treatment of all parameters (including file uploads)

I also think about this a lot since I'm working mostly
on applications with lots of file uploading. You'd
still get a sort of mismatch though, but would be in
the type of thing that 'param' is returning.

In a way, with a POST everything is really an upload,
just that by convention if the type is urlencoded with
consider it a flat parameter list. But I think we
will need a more evolved way of thinking about this.
Work that's been done on the REST controllers suggest
a possible path. This way we can convert any type of
incoming POST into some sort of Perl object or List of
lists. Just need the correct de/inflators.

I like that Catalyst lets me easily separate
parameters extracted from a urlencoded body from
search query parameters. I do really use then for
separate things.

You could probably write a quick plugin to push upload
objects into the param list, but messing with that
list will probably result in it not being widely
accepted.





____________________________________________________________________________________
Be a better Globetrotter. Get better travel answers from someone who knows. Yahoo! Answers - Check it out.
http://answers.yahoo.com/dir/?link=list&sid96545469

No, because this would break the ability to pass the request object to
something expecting the CGI.pm API, and break compat for existing app code.

Maybe have a think about what you'd like to see from a completely new
unified API and propose that?

I think you meant Apache::Request because the current implementation
is not compatible with CGI.pm.

->param( 'file_field' ):
- in CGI returns the filename that is also a filehandle
- in Catalyst it is just filename

->upload( 'uploaded_file_name' )
- in CGI returns a filehandle
- in Catalyst returns Catalyst::Request::Upload
So my wishlist would be: ->upload to return the filehandle (for
compatibility with CGI), ->param to return Catalyst::Request::Upload,
and make Catalyst::Request::Upload stringify to the filename. If we
could also make Catalyst::Request::Upload work as a filehandle in
angle brackets it would be entirely compatible with CGI.pm (but not
with Apache::Request).

My mistake.
That looks like it'd improve compat, give you what you want, and not
break any existing code, unless I've misunderstood your logic. Assuming
I haven't, I'd love to see a patch to do this - does anybody else have
any thoughts?