Ace::B...chSubs(3pm)

💖 Ace::Browser::SearchSubs — the manual page, bestie edition ✨

okay so you found the man page for Ace::Browser::SearchSubs(3pm) — that's the Perl doc you're holding, and it's literally the toolkit for writing search scripts in AceBrowser. The (3pm) just means "perl module, section 3, we're fancy like that". Let's go 🦋

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✨ NAME ✨

Ace::Browser::SearchSubs — subroutines for AceBrowser search scripts. That's the whole vibe. It's the plug-in that makes your search pages pop off 💅

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

Here's the little taste test, verbatim, no notes:

use Ace;
use Ace::Browser::AceSubs;
use Ace::Browser::SearchSubs;
use CGI qw(:standard);

my $form = p(start_form,
             textfield(-name=>'query'),
             end_form);
AceSearchTable('Search for stuff',$form);
...

my $query  = param('query');
my $offset = AceSearchOffset;
my ($objects,$count) = do_search($query,$offset);
AceResultsTable($objects,$count,$offset,'Here are results');

see how it flows?? build a form, hand it to AceSearchTable, grab the params, search, then dump it all into AceResultsTable. chef's kiss 👑

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💜 DESCRIPTION 💜

So Ace::Browser::SearchSubs exports a little bundle of constants and subroutines — and bestie, they are everything when you're building AceBrowser search scripts. Ready?

🎀 CONSTANTS 🎀

This package exports the following constants:

• MAXOBJECTS — the maximum number of objects that can be displayed per page. Like, the ceiling. Don't exceed it, iykyk.
• SEARCH_ICON — an icon to use for search links. ⚠️ heads up: this is deprecated. Use Configuration->Search_icon instead. it's giving "old news", we moved on 💀

🔥 FUNCTIONS 🔥

These functions are exported:

• $offset = AceSearchOffset() — when the user is paging back and forth among a multi-page list of results, this function returns the index of the first item to display. that's it, that's the job. it's the "where do I start counting" guy 🫶
• AceSearchTable([{hash}],$title,@contents) — give it a title plus some HTML contents, and it formats the search into a table, paints it with the same background and foreground colors used elsewhere for searches, and then prints the formatted search out. The HTML contents are usually a fill-out form. For convenience, you can hand over the contents in multiple parts (lines or elements) and they'll all get concatenated together. And if that first argument is a hashref, its contents get passed to start_form() to override the form arguments. so flexible, so iconic ✨
• AceResultsTable($objects,$count,$offset,$title) — this subroutine formats the results of a search into a pageable list and prints out the resulting HTML. The following arguments are required:
  • $objects — an array reference containing the objects to place in the table.
  • $count — the total number of objects.
  • $offset — the offset into the array, as returned by AceSearchOffset()
  • $title — a title for the table.

🚨 important: the array reference should contain no more than MAXOBJECTS objects, and the AceDB query should be arranged in such a way that this is the case. don't be the main character who ignores this, bestie.

A typical idiom is the following:

my $offset = AceSearchOffset();
my $query  = param('query');
my $count;
my @objs = $db->fetch(-query=> $query,
                      -count  => MAXOBJECTS,
                      -offset => $offset,
                      -total => \$count
                     );
AceResultsTable(\@objs,$count,$offset,'Here are the results');

look at that -total => \$count sneaking the count in by reference. slay 🍓

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🐛 BUGS 🐛

Please report them. (yes, that's the whole section. short and honest, we love that for them. if you find one, go tell somebody 💖)

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

• Ace::Object
• Ace::Browser::SiteDefs
• Ace::Browsr::AceSubs
• the README.ACEBROWSER file

(and yes, Ace::Browsr::AceSubs is spelled exactly like that in the original — we do not correct the ancestors 💅)

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

Lincoln Stein <lstein@cshl.org>.

Copyright (c) 2001 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. See DISCLAIMER.txt for disclaimers of warranty.

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aaaand that's the whole page, no cap 🌸 this absolute classic of a doc is perl v5.42.3, dated 2026-08-19, from that Ace::B...chSubs(3pm) corner of the man pages. go forth and write search scripts, you gorgeous nerd, ily 💖✨🦋