On 25.09.2001 13:42:49 -0400 Paul Winkler <slinkp23@yahoo.com> wrote:
I got that at last :-). But WHY? I reckon it may be as simple as that the "'s render the whole thing a Python expression instead of something that can be handled directly by Zope. Is that so?
Exactly. Inside a dtml tag, anything in quotes is treated as python code.
If yes, I'd consider that a large drawback and inconsistency... and does Python syntax for the test have to be so complicated?
It's not "complicated" in normal python programming, which is usually easy, flexible, and powerful. But when you're limited to what you can fit between quotes in a dtml tag, you can't really take advantage of python effectively. It was never meant to be a language for one-liners.
Would be nice if there was a built-in function that does the very same thing that Zope does implicitly in <dtml-if foo>, only explicitly in a python expression. So I could go <dtml-if "checkforexistenceandvalue ('foo') and checkforexistenceandvalue ('bar')">. The way it is, that's hidden magic to me. I hate it if I get the feeling that the system uses functionality that's not available for me to use, too. Kind of like programming VBA :-)
But of course, we have python scripts and external methods, which are much better for jobs like this.
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Much nicer, eh?
Yes, thanks for that! Seems like I'll have to use those scripts more... (I've even been writing some external scripts in Python, only I was a little reluctant to use them all over the place for things as simple as some existence checking :-) Oliver -- Oliver Sturm / <sturm@oliver-sturm.de>