Forum OpenACS Q&A: Can anyone share templating details?

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Posted by Walter Smith on
Will anyone share details of how they successfully implemented the templating system on OpenACS 3.2.x? So far I've mostly been working with Vlad's tarball that he posted in another thread, but I haven't gotten it to work completely.

Can anyone tell me:

1) Does the templating system require Postgres 7.1? (I'm currently on 7.0.3)

2) Does the ATS database api code need to be modified? (This seems to be blowing up on me, and there has been some hint at it in previous posts.)

After I first installed the ATS, according to what instructions I could find, when I restarted my server it would no longer serve up any pages. I traced the problem back to the new ad_parameter procedure in the ATS tcl library, which evidently takes a different number of arguments than the original. When I compared the code to the standard OpenACS version of the same procedure they were too dissimilar for me to try to reconcile the functionality into one procedure. So I renamed the ATS verion "ats_parameter" and changed the calls in the rest of the ATS code accordingly. This got me to at least partial functionality.

When I try running the demo a few of the examples work, mainly the ones that only use basic formatting in the templates. However, all the examples that use the database api throw various errors.

Does this sound familiar to anyone? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

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Posted by Ryan Campbell on
I don't think you need PostgreSQL 7.1; at least I didn't.  Did you set your DatabaseInterface to 'generic' in the ATS section of your nsd ini file?  This tripped me up when I installed it.
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Posted by Walter Smith on
Thanks Ryan.  No, I don't have that in my nsd file (I'm using nsd.tcl rather than nsd.ini).  Can you tell me the syntax you're using?

The only sections I added in my nsd.tcl for the ATS are the ones that were in the file in the /etc directory of Vlad's tarball.  I couldn't find any other documentation of additional parameters that needed to be set up.

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Posted by Ryan Campbell on
Take a look at the installation instructions. I've linked to my own version in case it wasn't included in Vlad's distribution. It tells you all sorts of stuff that would be good to know.
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Posted by Walter Smith on
Thanks again Ryan.  I didn't have that documentation.  Where did you get the distribution of ATS you're using?
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Posted by Ryan Campbell on
I got it from the CMS website. Basically, I downloaded CMS, copied the ATS directory into my server root and then symlinked everything to the right places. I did this serveral months ago, so things may have changed since then.
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Posted by Walter Smith on
Thanks.  I'll experiment with that.
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Posted by Todd Gillespie on
Just a general question: has anyone else worked with the Oak Road template system in conjunction with ACS?  I did a lot of work with it last year in a company that was unsatisfied with the perf of Karl's system.  Given that I haven't done anything front-end in 6 months, I'm clueless on the community's attitude in regards to templates.