Re: Couple newbie questions

Friday, October 8, 2004, 4:31:16 PM, Erich Oliphant wrote:

> Hi,
> I am using FMPP w/ Ant to create a installer for our application.  
> Working pretty good so far but have a couple issues:
>
> 1) We've using the ant XMLProperty to create Ant properties based on XML 
> config files.  This is great for us, as we have lots of config items and 
> grouping them hierarchically is convienient.  The problem, of course, is 
> that ant properties of the form 'parent.property' are a problem for 
> FMPP/Freemarker since ${parent.property} tries to resolve 'parent' then 
> 'property' as a child.  I read the FM docs regarding the 
> ${.vars["parent.property"]} syntax to get around the problem.  That 
> works but is syntactically clunky.  Is there a cleaner way to do this?

No... This is actually a FreeMarker syntax issue, although I don't blame
FreeMarker for this.

> 2) Some of the files that we are configuring are Unix shell scripts.  In 
> some cases the ${SHELL_VAR} form for shell variables is used, and the 
> FMPP processing throws an error when it hits one of these as they are 
> not defined.  This becomes a tricky problem as it's nice to know from an 
> FMPP perspective that I've hit an undefined variable reference, but in 
> this case I'd like to maybe log, the undefined var and keep processing.  
> Or is there some way to define an alternate variable resolution syntax 
> for FMPP/Freemarker?  This is a Java web application were building so we 
> are going to run into the same problem with Java Expression Language 
> variables that use the ${} form as well.

That's an issue with FreeMarker (again), namely that it doesn't allow
the configuration of its syntax. I know this is a real problem for
general purpose file preprocessors, because so many other formats use
${exp}... Currently you can write ${'$'}{SHELL_VAR}, which is obviously
terrible if you have to do it frequently. A workaround would be to
replace all @{...}-s with ${...}, and all ${...} with ${'$'}{...} when
FMPP loads the template files, thus simulate that the FreeMarker
interpolation syntax is @{exp}. That slows things down a little bit,
also possibly distorts the column number in error messages, but I guess
that would be better than nothing. What do you think?

-- 
Best regards,
 Daniel Dekany


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