I am new to Perl Mason.
I came across this with the suggestion that service calls should be put inside PREPARE block. But when I placed my service calls inside it, seems like the code inside it is never getting executed itself.
<%method PREPARE>
Kindly suggest what is the above block for and its usage.
From the Mason Manual:
The base component class, Mason::Component, has but a few built-in methods: handle, render, wrap, main, m, and cmeta.
The main method contains the mix of HTML and Perl in the main part of the component.
You can add other methods that output HTML via the section; these methods automatically have access to $self and $m.
<%method leftcol> <table><tr> <td><% $foo %></td> ... </tr></table> </%method> ... <% # call leftcol method and insert HTML here %> <% $.leftcol %>
Which means you are declaring a method named PREPARE without any argument lists by <%method PREPARE> and after writing the method body you will end it using </%method>.
And, later somewhere you will call it using <% $.PREPARE %>.For more info refer the Mason Manual.