[html-formfu] Caching FormFu objects

[Carl Franks]

2008/11/18 Ronald J Kimball <rkimball+formfu at pangeamedia.com>:
> I'm using FormFu in an application that gets a fair amount of traffic, and
> creates the same forms over and over again.
>
> I had the idea to cache the FormFu objects in memcached, rather than create
> them from scratch every time.  This works as long as the cached object is
> retrieved in the same process.  However, if the object is retrieved in
> another process, then some of the HTML::FormFu modules may not have been
> loaded, leading to errors such as the following:
>
> [error] Couldn't render template "undef error - Can't locate object method
> "process" via package "HTML::FormFu::Deflator::CompoundSplit" at
> /home/rkimball/svn/pangea/trunk/site_perl/HTML/FormFu/Element/_Field.pm line
> 625.
> "
>
> I know that this is not specifically a memcached/HTML::FormFu issue, but
> rather a general issue with serializing objects.  I'm not sure what a
> general solution would be, however, especially because package names don't
> necessarily correspond directly to module files.  So I'm wondering if anyone
> else has tried caching FormFu objects, if they encountered this problem, and
> how they dealt with it in this specific case.

Hi Ronald,

If you add a "use HTML::FormFu::Preload;" somewhere, it'll load up all
elements, constraints, plugins, etc - which will solve this problem at
the cost of a higher memory usage.
The other option would be to manually add "use" statements for all
elements, etc. that you need - you'll just need to remember to keep it
updated.

It might make sense for the caching to be added to
Catalyst-Controller-HTML-FormFu, so it can be cached/retrieved before
the catalyst context is added to the form stash - otherwise you'll
have problems.

Carl