Forum OpenACS Q&A: Arbitrary Template File Extensions

I realize now that I'm not being very clear in what I'm asking. Here's what I want to do...

  www.myserver.com/section/css/screen.css

  should be processed by the template system. There
  is a corresponding screen.tcl file that sets up the
  data sources. In other words, screen.css should be
  processed as if it was screen.adp

Yes, I could make a file called screen.adp and just ask for:

  www.myserver.com/section/css/screen

but that's not what I want to do.

Well, if a user asks for the file:

  www.myserver.com/section/index

and the index file links to:

  www.myserver.com/section/css/screen.css

I want the css file to pass through the templating system so that it can have certain values for colour or formatting updated by the template system.

Maybe I'm missing something really obvious here, but how else can I do this besides forcing OpenACS to process my css file as if it was an adp file?

I think the problem with your method is that the screen.css will not be processed by the template system...

I know how to link to stylesheets, what I want to do is have the stylesheet pass through the template system.

Am I missing something glaringly obvious?

Vinod,

I guess in general, what I want to have is a way of telling OpenACS to use extension "xyz" in exactly the same way as if it was an "adp" file.

The browser asks for "screen.css" and my (ideal) OpenACS server says, hmmm, I'd better run this through the template system and return screen.css with all of the variables set to the new values.

This part of your description is almost right...

You have <p class="foo"> in your index.adp file. You want the "foo" class to be blue in some circumstances and orange in other circumstances. So when index.adp links out to screen.css, you want screen.css to be built dynamically with the "foo" class set to the proper color.

In fact, I'll have one set of pages on my website where foo is blue, and another set of pages where foo is orange. They don;t change on a single page. Depending on where in the tree the index.adp file is, it will link in a different screen.css file with the colour attribute set appropriately.

Being a lazy programmer, and realizing that my css files are almost identical, and not wanting to synchronize them, I through that passing them through the template system might do what I want.

I _could_ just write up a tcl script that uses a master screen.css file and writes out the site dependent screen.css files as needed....

Dave wrote:

"The whole point of CSS is that a class would be universally defined for your site."

Exactly - except I want blue paragraphs in one part of my site and orange in another. And if I move the source files from one part of my site to the other, I don't want to have to change the class names.

I think I'll succumb to the general weight of advice here and not try and process the css files through the template system. I'll generate them another way. They all have the same source, the same tags and attributes. Only some of the attribute values change between the css files in different parts of the site.

It was soooo tempting to make the changes happen automagically.....

Thanks for all the advice so far.

Yep, that will work just fine. And I could even generate the css file dynamically and make sure it's in the file system before the current page is returned.

That way the browser can fetch it (as needed) and the css file will have automatically generated values.

I could also just leave the CSS file as a static file....

Ralph - just to confirm what has already been said - I looked at the same issue a while ago and came to the conclusion that it can't be done.

I decided to set up different css files and switch them in the master template.

I did have one thought though: you could redefine specific styles dynamically in the master template and include them in the html file. That way they *might* override the css defined ones. I'm not a css expert so this might not work, but it's a thought :)

<Raad>

This won't work without some code, and any CMS effort we work on should include at least some support for CSS files.

Dave, it's clear that leaving stuff in the back of your mind helps you understand the problem 😊

I think what you are suggesting will work, but I'm not sure that the support has to be specific to css files. The css is really just a special case of the general problem of generating page contents based on location in a file system.

That being said, it _would_ be nice to have a UI that allows one to browse attribute/value pairs and assign them based on location in the published file tree.

ie, if you're asking for a css file for a file being published to foo, then make the P tags orange. If the file is published to bar, make them blue, and so on.

Ralph