How to access perl hash value (which is an array) from Template Toolkit?

Question

I have assigned a hash in perl as follows:

my %myvers;
my @patches = ();
my @mypatches = ();

foreach my $myv ( @{$product->versions} ){

@patches = set_patches($myv->id);   #get the array of patches for the version
foreach(@patches) {
    push @mypatches,@{$_};
    }
$myvers{$myv->name} = @mypatches;
}

$vars->{'myvers'} = \%myvers;

When I access the hash in html template with the code below:

[% FOREACH key IN myvers.keys %]
alert('[% key %] is [% myvers.$key %]; ');
[% END %] 

key contains the keys and $key contains the number of elements in the array for each key assigned above.

I cannot access the values of elements of the array. How can I do that ?

Answer 1

The problem is you don't store the elements, you only store the size.

$myvers{ $myv->name } = @mypatches;

Assigning to a hash value forces a scalar context, so @mypatches returns the size of the array. You need to store a reference to the array instead:

$myvers{ $myv->name } = [ @mypatches ];

It's probably more common to declare the array inside the outer loop and use a reference. In fact, you can skip pushing the elements one by one, as you can push the whole array: push @mypatches, @patches , but then, you don't need two arrays at all:

my %myvers;

for my $myv (@{ $product->versions }) {
    my @patches = set_patches($myv->id);
    $myvers{ $myv->name } = \@patches;
}

$vars->{myvers} = \%myvers;

or, if you really want to be laconic:

$myvers{ $_->name } = [ set_patches($_->id) ] for @{ $product->versions };