[ZPT] How Do I Use ZPT Output In Python Code?

[Dieter Maurer]

Shane McChesney writes:
 > ...
 > 
 > Not sure how clear that is, but post any follow-up
 > questions and I'll respond as quickly as possible.
I did not got it, but I am not interested enough to try
hard to understand it...

 > ...
 > I have built a management page that lets me click on a
 > button to fire the "setQuestionUI" method, which should
 > apply the question template ZPT to the Question instance,
 > then store the results in the "QuestionUI" property of the
 > instance.
The result is what? A string, a list, a what?
How should it be interpreted?

 > It runs without erroring out (at least the
 > versions below do), but I don't get the expected result. I
What do you expect?
 > want the XHTML results in that property, not the stuff
 > you'll see below.
A property does not have "XHTML" results, it is of a simple
datatype: a string, a list, a datetime, ...

 > 	def setQuestionUI(self, REQUEST = None):
 > 		"Generate the appropriate XHTML representation for this
 > question."
 > 		thePTFile = PageTemplateFile('www/viewQuestion',
 > globals(), __name__ = 'thePTFile')
 > 		self.QuestionUI = thePTFile
 > 
 > 		if REQUEST is not None:
 > 			return self.manage_main(self, REQUEST)
 > 
 > ..populates the QuestionUI property with...
 > 
 > <PageTemplateFile instance at 02197AD0>
That's the Page Template instance itself. You need to call
it, in order to render it.

 > --------------------------------------------------
 > While this approach...
 > 
 > 	def setQuestionUI(self, REQUEST = None):
 > 		"Generate the appropriate XHTML representation for this
 > question."
 > 		thePTFile = PageTemplateFile('www/viewQuestion',
 > globals(), __name__ = 'thePTFile').document_src()
 > 		self.QuestionUI = thePTFile
 > 
 > 		if REQUEST is not None:
 > 			return self.manage_main(self, REQUEST)
 > 
 > ..populates the QuestionUI property with...
 > 
 > <!-- Page Template Diagnostics
 >  Macro expansion failed
 >  exceptions.TypeError: object of type 'string' is not
 > callable
 > -->
It lacks acquisition context (and therefore its bindings).
But it would not give you what you like, anyway. When it starts
working, it will give you the Page Template source. I doubt
very much that you can do something with it.


Your method "setQuestionUI" is context independent (i.e. a constant).
Almost sure, you do not want this.


Assume, you want the rendered result of the ZPT in your property,
then you would use:

     thePTFile= PageTemplateFile(...).__of__(self)
     self.QuestionUI= thePTFile()

It would be even better, when you moved the "PageTemplateFile" out
of the method into a class variable:

     thePTFile= PageTemplateFile(...)
     def setQuestionUI(self):
       ....
       self.QuestionUI= self.thePTFile()


Dieter