Forum OpenACS Development: Templating on the fly?

is it possible to serve html from the database on the fly containing @...@ parameters?

I want to define a table with a column let's say fragment that contains HTML-Fragments including @...@ parameters. An sql statement show return the apropriate html from database. Now the tricky part is that the HTML contains parameters that should be replaced with values like users.user_id first.

Has anyone an idea or hint how I could do this?

Best wishes,
Nima

Jade, it sounds like Nima wants to evaluate a chunk of text from the database as a template, or template chunk.

I haven't figured out a way of doing this yet (when it has @a@ or @a.b@ references).

The problem seems to be that evaluating a template produces a chunk of tcl code, it doesn't produce a string ready to return to the connection.

Its possible to create data_getter.tcl that gets the value on the db.  And ad_return_template to displayer_1.adp or maybe you want to add logic to use displayer_2.adp.

By not putting ad_return_template foo, it will implicitly  return the current adp pair for you tcl.  You can override this by using ad_return_template.

You can look at bcms-ui-base on contrib.  But maybe its more complicated that most packages that use ad_return_template.  Try grepping for ad_return_template you will surely get a lot of those.  I think the old bboard has lots of them.