[Zope-PTK] Re: DISCUSS: Changing template construction

[Duncan Booth]

Christopher Petrilli wrote:

> Here's the format we talked about: 

> <dtml-component template="component_template_name"
> insertAs="content"> ... ... ... </dtml-component> 

<snip>

> * Should there be a default 'template'?  We don't know :-) 
Also, can you pass additional arguments into the template? I 
occasionally end up calling the standard header and footer with 
explicit arguments.

Assuming that dtml-component is just like any other tag and can be 
used freely wherever you want, here are a few other things that 
might be possible, or might not be possible depending on how it is 
implemented (and if you feel any of them might be considered 
component abuse feel free to say):

Given a dtml method called stx with a body of:
 <dtml-var name="template_contents" fmt="structured-text">
you could embed a chunk of structured text in the middle of a 
method just by sticking:
    <dtml-component template="stx">
    ... some structured text here ...
    </dtml-component>
at any suitable position.

If template is allowed to be blank (or failing that if you use a dummy 
method with an empty body, then you get a way to lay out large 
chunks of DTML neatly without generating any output (even spaces):
    <dtml-component template="">
         <dtml-if ....>
             ... 95 lines of DTML in here! ...
         </dtml-if>
   </dtml-component>

Other fun methods for use as templates could aggressively remove 
varying degrees of whitespace (I can think of uses for removing all 
whitespace, all multiple spaces, or all whitespace directly following a 
'>').

Getting a bit more obscure, you now have a general way to assign 
the output of some dtml into a variable for further processing.

Finally, and this *must* be component abuse, it ought to be possible 
to write an external method that takes template_contents, does a 
global replace of the value in template_tag (or 'DTML' if it isn't 
defined) into dtml, and then evaluates the result as a block of dtml.
This would let you do things like sorting on a variable column:
    <dtml-component template="evaldtml">
         <DTML-in name="somequery" sort="&dtml-sortcolumn;">
	<DTML-col1> <DTML-col2>
         </DTML-in>
    </dtml-component>

-- 
Duncan Booth                                             duncan@dales.rmplc.co.uk
int month(char *p){return(124864/((p[0]+p[1]-p[2]&0x1f)+1)%12)["\5\x8\3"
"\6\7\xb\1\x9\xa\2\0\4"];} // Who said my code was obscure?
http://dales.rmplc.co.uk/Duncan