[Templates] creating dynamic hidden fields in templates

[Brian Clarkson]

i've been fighting with this problem all day now, read through the
mailing list archives, but still haven't found a working solution.

i have one line in my template to create hidden fields:

[% cgi.hidden( Name => 'section' ).join %]

which will work if there are multiple values for the param name
'section'.  the above code fails to generate a hidden form element if
there is only one value associated with the name ( and somewhat
understandably ... it IS a one-element array, but i remember reading
somewhere in the message archives that one-element arrays getr
downgraded to scalars ... )

so i tried this:

[% hidden_name = [ cgi.param( Name => 'section' ).list ] %]

[% IF hidden_name.size <= 1 %]
[% cgi.hidden( Name => 'section' ) %]
[% ELSIF hidden_name.size >= 2 %]
[% cgi.hidden( Name => 'section' ).join %]
[% ELSE %]
tests failed completely
[% END %]

but to no avail.  the size of what should be @hidden_name always
evalutes to 1, never to more than one, even though there is also output
on the page ( rows in a table ) that correspond to the 'section' param
in the CGI object ...

am i missing something obvious?

brian