Re: About Headers and Footers

Friday, June 22, 2007, 4:01:20 PM, Juan Larran wrote:

> Hello,
>   =

> I=92ve some experience with FreeMarker and recently i started to use
> fmpp to generate ftl pages from an xml file.
>   =

> Most of the pages used the same tlds and tags libraries, so I tried to us=
e the header configuration.
>   =

> The problem that I have it=92s the next one:
>   =

> From the file fmpp_list.ftl i generate a lot of pages (ie
> product_list_index.ftl, product_list_body.ftl,
> product_list_labels.ftl, product_list_ftl, and so for different
> entities), when I put a header to **/*_body_list.ftl the fmpp didn=92t
> findd that file and don=92t put anything. If I put **/*.ftl they put
> the header to fmpp_list.ftl but not for the generated files.
>   =

> How could I put a header to the generated files?
>   =

> I generated the files by the command <@pp.changeOutputFile inside the fmp=
p_list.ftl

I guess you misunderstand the header/footer feature. It puts the
header/footer at the top/bottom of the *template* (i.e. FTL) files
before FreeMarker parses them. It doesn't directly affect the output.
It meant to be used for adding commonly used stuff like
<#import ...>-s and <#escape ...>-s to the *templates*, to save key
strokes for the template author. But of curse as it can contain
arbitrary FTL, it can be used for much more.

I suppose you generate multiple output files from a single template in
loop. In that case it's trivial to add a common header to each
*output* file, as you can specify it inside the loop:

  <#list ....>
     <@pp.changeOutputFile ... />
     You common header comes here.
     Other non-header stuff comes here.
  </#list>


Now, if you want to control these common *output* file headers using
the FMPP "borders" setting, then you could specify a header there like
this:

  <#macro commonHeader>
     You common header comes here. It can contain markup,
     interpolations, directive calls, etc.
  </#macro>

Note again that this will be the header of *templates*. It will define
(not execute) a "commonHeader" macro in each templates whose header it
is, but it will not output anything yet. Then inside the output file
loop you can do this:

  <#list ....>
     <@pp.changeOutputFile ... />
     <@commonHeader /> <#-- Now it is actually printed -->
     ... other non-header stuff ...
  </#list>

-- =

Best regards,
 Daniel Dekany


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