Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: List builder and column widths of generated tables

Collapse
Posted by Torben Brosten on

Do you mean to force a wrap on content that normally stretches the width of a table column?

If I remember right, in css you can define floating boxes with fixed widths:

.area1 { 
    position: absolute; 
    left: 14px; 
    top: 5px;
    width: 150px;
    z-index: 5 ; 
    clip: rect(    );
 }

Note the clip atribute is not valid css

In pure HTML, you can fix the first column's cell width using single pixel spacers, but that breaks for oversized content.

Collapse
Posted by Andrei Popov on

No, what I want is to generate a page that can then be picked up by XSLT/FO processor to generate a PDF. I have (had, since migration) it working on 4.6.3, but it was just a hand-written ADP page that simply had a <colspec> tag.

Problem is that FOP cannot do automatic/proportional table layout -- it needs fixed.

I've started trying to add a -colspec {list} parameter to template::list::create, but am running on varname:rowcount problems. Tcl code I added to list-proc.tcl goes thusly:

    # setup colspec param
    set colspec:rowcount 0
    template::multirow create colspec width
    foreach width $list_properties(colspec) {
        template::multirow  append colspec width
    }
Array list_properties also has an element (list) added. On acs-templating/resource/table.adp side I added:
  <if @list_properties.colspec@ not nil>
    <colspec>
    <multiple name="colspec">
      <col @colspec.width@ />
    </multiple>
    </colspec>
  </if>

Calling page:

template::list::create -name bugs -multirow bugs \
    -key bug_number \
    -elements $elements \
    -filters $filters \
    -html {cols 6} \
    -colspec {10 10 10 10 10 10}

With this I get:

can't read "colspec:rowcount": no such variable
    while executing
"for { set __d39_i 1 } { $__d39_i <= ${colspec:rowcount}  } { incr __d39_i } {
    upvar 0 colspec:$__d39_i colspec
  
append __adp_output "
      <col..."
    invoked from within
"if {! ([template::util::is_nil list_properties(colspec)])} {
append __adp_output "
    <colspec>
    "


  if {[info exists colspec]} {
      upvar 0 ..."

If I add -local switch and then start playing with -ulevel and template::multirow upvar I start getting colspec:rowcount already defined.

This is just a bit over my Tcl skills :(....

Collapse
Posted by Jeff Davis on
template::multirow create colspec width

should create the colspec:rowcount variable so my guess is that this is not being called that or the template is not being evaled at adp_level. You could add a <%= [info locals] %> in place of your multiple loop just to see what variables are in fact defined.

also this:

template::multirow  append colspec width
should be:
template::multirow  append colspec $width
Collapse
Posted by Andrei Popov on
colspec:rowcount is indeed missing in <%= [info locals] %> output

I've tried to change as follows:

set colspec:rowcount 0
template::multirow create colspec width
foreach width $list_properties(colspec) {
    template::multirow append colspec $width
}
template::multirow -local -ulevel [expr $ulevel + 1] upvar colspec

but result is the same/similar: if I leave set colspec:rowcount I get colspec:rowcount already defined, if I comment it out, I get colspec:rowcount no such variable.

Playing with differnt values of -ulevel does not help either...

Collapse
Posted by Jeff Davis on
Are you sure the code is really being executed? You might want to put an ns_log statment in there. Also, an alternative (since it seems the list_properties.colspec var does wind it's way through) is to use the <list> tag to generate the colspec.

Out of curiousity, what are you using to xform html to fo (is it some standard xsl or something you wrote yourself)?

I have been using docbook-xsl and FOP to produce PDFs and have been ok with the output although I see a lot of shortcomings with FOP for realistic sized documents.

Collapse
Posted by Andrei Popov on
Yeah, code is being executed all right.  I had ns_log in there and -colspec gets read and if you call template::multirow size it returns 6 -- the number of rows in the created multirow!

I am using XHTML2FO XSL stylesheet as picked up from Antenna House website here: http://www.antennahouse.com/XSLsample/XSLsample.htm

Works very well.  What I do is a bit of a hack, really: I fetch (rather wget) the page, pass it through tidy to make sure that all that has to be quoted is, then apply XSL transformation using xsltproc.  Once .fo is generated I use FOP to produce a .pdf out of it.