Re: Nested Java directives - best practice on how to make values available to inner directive?

Friday, February 1, 2008, 9:56:18 AM, Alistair Israel wrote:

> On Jan 31, 2008 6:16 PM, Daniel Dekany <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Anyway, what you are looking for is
>> called "parent-child communication" or "parent-children communication"
>> on this list. But this feature was only added in 2.4, which is
>> unreleased and unstable.
>
> Thanks. That's pretty much what I'm looking for, exactly. Can't wait
> for 2.4, then.
>
>
>> They won't be (unless the Spring guys did some big trick...), since a
>> shared variable is always a top-level variable, for technical reasons.
>
> So shared variables are always top-level variables, got it. I guess
> the segue question is how do I load custom Java directives at
> Configuration time?
>
> I mean, what's the equivalent of
> Configuration.addAutoInclude("mynamespace", "mymacros.ftl") for custom
> Java directives?

It should be the freemarker.core.Environment.importLib(String
templateName, String namespace) method. However, it can only be called
on tempalte-execution-time (or, right before that), as you can see
from the Environment. Outside Environment-s it would be tricky to load
an FTL "macro library", as some macros may expect to be in the runtime
environment that the "macro library" template creates. So in the
generic case they can't just be tear out from the template, and put
into the shared variable set or something. It's the other way around
as you seem to approach the problem: if you want to use custom
directives as shared variables, first you have to have the
TemplateDirectiveModel implementations that you can put into the
shared variable set (or into the data-model). And then, if for
whatever reasons you also want them to be #import-able, or part of an
already existing *FTL* macro library, you have to and insert the said
TemplateDirectiveModel implementations into the FTL file using #assign
and ?new.

>> I say, use globals for now... Which can be even more irritating when
>> you have directives that can be nested into the same kind of directive
>> (like: <@ul bullet="box.gif">...<@ul bullet="arrow.gif">...</@ul>...</@ul>)
>
> I know. Or see if Jonathan's tip on using
> env.getCurrentNameSpace().get() will help in cases like this.

Not regarding the lastly mentioned issue... there you have to
implement some kind of stack. (Of course that stack can be the global
or namespace variable.)

> Ahh - meanwhile, I'll just have to be content with what can get done
> now.
>
> - Alistair A. Israel

-- 
Best regards,
 Daniel Dekany


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