Re: Request for more contextual data to filters and coderef vars

On Sat, 25 Feb 2006, Brad Choate wrote:

> Hi all-- brand new to the list, but I've been using HTML::Template for
> some time. Just to quickly introduce myself... I work at Six Apart as
> one of the engineers of Movable Type.  MT uses HTML::Template for all
> of its application UI.

Hey Brad, good to meet you.  I believe I owe my mention in the book
"We Blog" to Six Apart.  I'll let you decide if that's a good thing or
not.

> First, for filters: a filter should be able to determine what file is
> currently being processed, if the contents of the template did come
> from a file.

I guess that makes sense.  I'm curious though - what are you planning
to do with this feature?

> Second, for template vars that are coderefs.
>
> To me, these are a bit limited since the coderef has no way to
> determine it's context.  I'm envisioning a scenario like this:
>
>    <TMPL_LOOP NAME=X>
>        <TMPL_VAR NAME=CODE_FOO>
>    </TMPL_LOOP>
>
> The coderef associated with 'code_foo' is called for each iteration of
> the array in parameter 'x', but 'code_foo' has no way to access the
> active row of data.

This seems less obviously useful to me.  If the data-structure for
loop X is so complicated then why make it more complicated by using
code-refs?  Why not just bake it all into the structure you pass to
param() in the first place?

I should admit, I very rarely use code-ref params in my work.  They
seem to have a very limited utility.  I used them to implement
HTML::Template::Expr, but I wouldn't say I'm proud of that fact!

-sam


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