Dynamic images in Dreamwidth

[anarres]

This seems like it should be easy but I'm really stuck. I'm trying to dynamically display images - i.e. generate the image with a perl script and display it without saving it to the server.

This simple example works on my Heliohost server, but not on Dreamwidth (the example is from http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=18565):

--------test.shtml------------
<img src="test.cgi?size=100" alt="" />
------------------------------


--------test.cgi------------
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use CGI;
use GD;

my $cgi=new CGI;
my $cgi_size=$cgi-&gt;param('size') || '50';

print &quot;Content-type: image/gif\n\n&quot;;
my $gd=new GD::Image($cgi_size,$cgi_size);
my $blue=$gd-&gt;colorAllocate(0,0,255);
$gd-&gt;fill(0,0,$blue);
binmode STDOUT; #just in case we're on NT
print $gd-&gt;gif;
------------------------------


I'm stumped - has anyone got any ideas?

Comments

[anarres]

Hmm... about deciding who's responsible for extracting data: if the controller for the page itself was responsible, would that mean the SiteStats controller would pass stats to views/stats/site.tt, which would then pass them to a graph-making controller module, which would then make the graph, which would then be displayed on site.tt? (My head hurts!)

[pauamma]

Something like that. stats.tt would output (at the appropriate location in the HTML source) something along the lines of <img src="http://www.dreamwidth.org/stats/piechart?free=2&amp;paid=3&amp;premium=5&amp;seed=7" alt=Pie chart: 2 free accounts, 3 paid, 5 premium paid, 7 seed" /> (URL scheme and item names meant as an example only).

:hands you some Tylenol.

[anarres]

Erm, but how do I get all that information (free=2 etc.) into the controller module that makes the pie chart?

If I navigate to piechart?free=2, does the information free=2 get passed to piechart.tt or to the controller module Piechart.pm?

[pauamma]

To the handler in the controller module. You can retrieve it with the following code in the handler:

my $r = DW::Request->get;
my $free = $r->get_args->{free};

For more information, see http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/notes/Routing_and_Template_Toolkit#Creating_a_handler_function