6.12. Method Handlers: The Browse and See, Browse and View Example

Let's look at an example of the method-handler concepts presented in Chapter 4. Suppose you need to implement a handler that allows browsing the files in the document root and beneath. Directories should be browsable (so you can move up and down the directory tree), but files should not be viewable (so you can see the available files, but you cannot click to view them).

So let's write a simple file browser. We know what customers are like, so we suspect that the customer will ask for similar customized modules pretty soon. To avoid having to duplicate our work later, we decide to start writing a base class whose methods can easily be overridden as needed. Our base class is called Apache::BrowseSee.