[mv] Getting @keys from %DB in Perl structures

[Randy Moore <ramoore@axion-it.net>]

******    message to minivend-users from Randy Moore <ramoore@axion-it.net>     ******

Hi All,

I'm trying to learn to properly use the %Db structure inside of a [perl] tag.

I'm close, but I'm missing one (probably trivial) thing:  How to get an 
array of keys for a database.

Specifically, I'm trying to loop through every item in my products 
database.  If I pass the list of keys into my Perl through a scratch 
variable, my code works fine, but this seems grossly inefficient.

The docs at
http://www.minivend.com/minivend/docindex/10.00.MiniVend_Perl_Objects.html
show examples using an '@keys' array, but never show how to create that array.

Here is the bit of code I'm playing with (it prepares an alphabetical index 
to my product titles, suppressing letters where no product title starts 
with that letter)

[seti name=codelist][tag each products][loop-code],[/tag][/seti]
[perl products]
         my($title, $retval, $code, $ref, %seen, $first);
         my(@codelist) = split(/,/, $Scratch->{codelist});
         $ref = $Db{products};
         foreach (@codelist) {
                 $code = $_;
                 $title = $ref->field($code, "title");
                 $first = uc(substr($title,0,1));
                 $seen{$first}++;
         }
         foreach $Alpha ('A' .. 'Z') {
                 if ($seen{$Alpha}) {
                         $retval .= "[page href=\"alpha\" arg=\"$Alpha\"]
                                         $Alpha</A> \n";
                 }
         }
         return "$retval";
[/perl]

It would seem much more reasonable to get my '@codelist' array directly 
from my $ref to $Db{products}.

I've tried several variations with 
$ref->field_accessor($ref->config('KEY')) and
$ref->column_index($ref->config('KEY')) but could not make it work.

Any suggestions?

Randy Moore
Axion Information Technologies, Inc.

email     ramoore@axion-it.net
phone   301-408-1200
fax        301-445-3947
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