-----Original Message----- From: Michael Bernstein [mailto:mbernstein@profitscape.net] Sent: Friday, October 08, 1999 02:52 To: Jay, Dylan Subject: Re: [Zope] inconsistency in tag argument syntax

"Jay, Dylan" wrote:

...

After playing around with making a tag an inconsistency in the tag syntax became apparent to me. Sometimes "asd" is treated as an expression and sometimes as a string. e.g. <dtml-let blah="aObject.method()"> is an expression however <dtml-mime name="aObject.method()"> makes the name argument a string with 'aObject.method()' This is confusing and inconsistent. Also treating any argument always as a string means that the value of the argument can never be dynamically specified i.e. there is no way I could name a mime block dynamically e.g. from a form. The same applies for instance to the 'sort' argument in <dtml-in>. This is very limiting.

The problem is however that I can't see a backwards compatible way of fixing this problem. Alternatives are a) You could introduce a evaluate expression syntax like there is in sh script. i.e. name="`myMethod()`". This however makes things more confusing and unreadable. b) Another possibility is to make all "non-expression" arguments become expression arguments. This would break existing code and mean all string constants look like name="'A name'" which is also not intuitive and messy. This could be made cleaner by allowing syntax such as name='A name'. c) Or ignore the problem.

I prefer option b). What do other people think?

If you want to provide dynamic atributes for all tags, the "&dtml-foo" entity syntax would be more appropriate, and would avoid breaking current implementations (I think). You would just have to assign the value of your expression to foo beforehand.

Are you saying that <dtml-let orderby="'aFieldName'"> <dtml-in aList sort=&dtml-orderby> </dtml-in> </dtml-let> will work? I don't think this is the case. From looking at the code I saw no place where this happens.