Forum OpenACS Q&A: ArsDigita Templating System

Posted by Roberto Mello on 03/18/01 04:49 AM

Vlad made his tarball of the ATS available, I downloaded a copy and today finally I have time to look at it. The thread where this was discussed is here https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=17849.

According to Vlad, I should put the ats dir under the AOLserver modules/tcl directory. Vlad, is that correct? I am a templating newbie, so forgive me if any of these are dumb.

One thing that is puzzling me is that under database-procs/ there are two files: generic.tcl and oracle.tcl. generic.tcl implements the API for query, onevalue, onerow and multirow.

However, oracle.tcl implements get_db_handle, release_db_handle, begin_db_transaction, end_db_transaction, query, onevalue, onerow, multirow, multilist, nestedlist, onelist, dml, iterate. It also implements caching of queries and the API implemented in oracle.tcl is much more detailed and with more checking than in generic.tcl. Most of these make use of ns_ora (I don't know why plain ns_db wasn't used. Anyone know?).

Anyways, I think the best way to go is to port these better-implemented oracle.tcl functions to generic.tcl.

Another question is where does the master template go? Thanks.

2: Response to ArsDigita Templating System (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 03/19/01 02:00 PM

The ns_ora calls are probably to the newish aD select and dml driver
API that allows things like:

ns_ora select "select foo from bar where key = :tcl_key"

The driver looks up tcl_key in your Tcl environment.

We've got that implemented in the newest Postgres driver (thanks
mostly to Dan) as ns_pg_bind commands.

There's actually nothing about these commands that are db-specific and
one thing I've discussed with a couple of folks is that eventually we
may just want to extend ns_db to do these tcl-var lookups, at least
for drivers we support for OpenACS. This implies a fork from the aD
Oracle driver, but a minor one and since aD will not be doing a hell
of a lot of future support work on the driver there's probably no real
cost involved, in practice.

But, for now, we'll use ns_pg_bind. In ACS 4x the calls are
restricted to the database API anyway (which I've already ported, BTW).

3: Response to ArsDigita Templating System (response to 1)

Posted by Jonathan Ellis on 03/19/01 04:47 PM

Where can I get this new driver and db API? I looked in the sdm and couldn't find anything... Are they up on cvs already?

4: Response to ArsDigita Templating System (response to 1)

Posted by Vlad Seryakov on 03/19/01 08:58 PM

master template may be specified as DefaultMaster parameter in config file. Otherwise it is hardcoded into tag-init.tcl as /www/default-master.It uses ad_parameter function, which i modified into ns_config for /ats section.
database-proc/oracle.tcl is used for Oracle, but it is possible just modify ns_ora into ns_db and it works fine.I am using modified version of oracle.tcl, but i didn't completed this for production use.

5: Response to ArsDigita Templating System (response to 1)

Posted by Wolfgang Winkler on 03/20/01 10:51 AM

Is the master/slave functionality working for you? If I view the
compiled slave template I get

set __adp_output ""
append __adp_output "<master src="master">

<property name="title">My Page</property>
...

set __adp_output

Shouldn't the master-tag be compiled too, to set the __adp_master?

6: Response to ArsDigita Templating System (response to 1)

Posted by Vlad Seryakov on 03/21/01 05:01 AM

Master template is working, i justdon't use default master, i always
specify which master template to use.

7: Response to ArsDigita Templating System (response to 1)

Posted by Christian Brechbühler on 03/21/01 05:52 PM

Wolfgang Winkler is right, the <master> (and <property>) tags should get translated, too. The complete slave page from the demo should translate into this:

set __adp_output ""

    set __adp_master [template::util::url_to_file "master" "$__adp_stub"]
set __adp_properties(title) "My Page"
append __adp_output "

<p>This is my page.</p>
"
set __adp_output

Your exact formatting might differ a bit, because this is from the demo page in package acs_templating under ACS 4.2, but the templating system should behave essentially the same. (I take it that you're using the standalone ATS.)

8: Response to ArsDigita Templating System (response to 1)

Posted by Wolfgang Winkler on 04/08/01 01:14 PM

I looked a bit closer and found, that in the function
adp_compile_chunk the various new tags should be changed into the
strings that are defined in tag-init.tcl.

They use the function ns_register_adptag, so this should be done
automatically by the funtcion ns_adp_parse. Although the tags are
registered, they are not substituted.

But if you call the .adp-files directly the tags get substituted.

9: a note about oracle.tcl and generic.tcl (response to 1)

Posted by Carl Coryell-Martin on 04/09/01 02:08 AM

A couple of weeks ago I ported our development installation of the ATS to use a modifed version of the oracle.tcl file rather than generic.tcl.

Basically I replaced ns_ora with ns_db.

In theory this bought me some really nice caching technology which wasn't implemented in my generic.tcl. I am still testing it to see how well it works, so your milage may vary...

cheers,