Re: Cheetah's #include base directory

On Thu, Jan 28, 2010, R. Tyler Ballance wrote:
> On Thu, 28 Jan 2010, Aahz wrote:
>> On Tue, Jan 26, 2010, R. Tyler Ballance wrote:
>>> On Tue, 26 Jan 2010, Aahz wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> All right, how do you do create global template elements such as page
>>>> footers?  I want to write them in Cheetah rather than Python because
>>>> they're primarily HTML.
>>> 
>>> I use inheritance between pre-compiled templates (since it's tricky
>>> to do with dynamic compilation), here's an example:
>>>
>>> base.tmpl: http://github.com/rtyler/urlenco.de/blob/master/Urlencode/views/base.tmpl
>>> index.tmpl: http://github.com/rtyler/urlenco.de/blob/master/Urlencode/views/index.tmpl
>> 
>> Ah-ha.  Well, since I *do* want dynamic compilation for development, I
>> guess I'm going to need to put in some skill sweat to figure out how to
>> make that work.
> 
> Indeed; I think adding the ability to use inheritance with dynamic
> compilation would be a good feature to add to Cheetah but I'm
> uncertain on what the API would look like?

We already have code we use to deal with dynamic vs pre-compiled, which
I guess I'll just extend a bit to deal with "including" templates:

def getTemplate(name):
    return os.path.join(os.path.realpath(os.path.join("..","..", "resource","html","templates")), name) + ".tmpl"

def run_template(tmpl_name, searchList, development=None):
    if development is None:
        development = "-d" in sys.argv or "--DEVELOPMENT" in sys.argv
    if development:
        logging.debug("Getting dev template: %s", tmpl_name)
        t = Template(file=getTemplate(tmpl_name), searchList=searchList)
    else:
        logging.debug("Getting compiled template: %s", tmpl_name)
        t = getattr(templates, tmpl_name)(searchList=searchList)
    return t.respond()

Obviously, getTemplate() relies on knowledge of our environment and would
need updating to work in the general case.  Similarly, the "templates"
package is also an artifact of our environment, and our build system
auto-generates the __init__.py of the package to hoist the template
classes into the root package namespace.

Hopefully this gives you ideas for something that can work in Cheetah.

But at least soon I will tell our developers to just use e.g.
$run_template('footer')
which isn't quite as nice as template inheritance but is straightforward
and will still be considerably better than what we currently have.
-- 
Aahz ([email protected])           <*>         http://www.pythoncraft.com/

"Many customs in this life persist because they ease friction and promote
productivity as a result of universal agreement, and whether they are
precisely the optimal choices is much less important." --Henry Spencer

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