Forum OpenACS Development: Annoying multirow behaviour

It seems that if a multirow is extended in the template::query call eg:

template::query get_categories categories multirow "select category_id as id, category_name as name from ec_categories order by sort_key" -eval {
    set row(url) "category-browse?category_id=$row(id)"
}

then you can't just append a row with something like:

template::multirow append categories "" "All Products" "all_products_url"

because the extended url column never gets set. Instead you need to:

template::multirow append categories "" "All Products"
set rownum [template::multirow size categories]
template::multirow set categories $rownum "url" "foobar"

This is somewhat annoying, and it means that code could break further down your existing tcl file if you change a column from being db-generated to being tcl-generated.

ah - so categories:columns is what i was looking for. I assume that's how positional columns (as opposed to named only columns) are determined.

the template::query example comes from 2002 vintage queries in ecommerce by Bart T - I wasn't quite sure why he used it either, but it's all over the place in ecommerce.

Since db_multirow takes care of all that for me, i'll just convert the calls where necessary.

Thanks Lars - as always, your knowledge is prodigious!