Forum OpenACS Development: bt_mergepiece?? Templating

I hope Philip sees this thread :) bt_mergepiece is probably one
of the oldest utilities written for AOLserver. It was originally
written for Naviserver 0.9 by Brian Tivol (do the initials bt make
sense now?) when Philip, Brian, and I worked on the Hearst
New Media site mmnewsstand.com (now dead) in 1995. I
rewrote it to be somewhat more efficient in 1996-7.

What does it do? It takes two arguments: a big chunk of HTML
that contains a raw form, and an ns_set that should be a bunch
of values for the fields in the HTML form. Usually, the ns_set
comes from a ns_db 1row query. The output is a chunk of HTML
that is exactly like the original chunk except that all vars in the
form now default to whatever values were in the ns_set. It works
with text fields, textareas, drop downs, radio boxes, etc... Pretty
useful stuff, but not exactly super efficient.

(This is very odd.  I posted a reply here this morning, but now it
doesn't show up in the page.  I will post it again.)

bt_mergepiece is a crusty bit of Philip code which takes in some HTML
containing <input> elements and marks some of them as 'selected'
depending on the value of Tcl variables.  Although creating forms with
the right things selected can be a pain, and it would be nice to
automate it a bit, having Tcl code munge already-generated HTML using
regexps is not the right way to do it.  bt_mergepiece has gone away in
ACS Tcl 4.2.

I have been doing some work on Simple Survey to use it with ACS 4.2 -
I replaced the call to bt_mergepiece and changed the user-visible
pages to use templating (at least for the header and footer).  I
released that version as 0.2.1 to the ACS Repository - since the
Repository's version number sorting is broken you need to 'show all
versions'.

I have done some more work on it since then, adding the ability to
attach pictures to questions and answers ('do you prefer this picture
or that one?', 'please give your opinion on this photograph').  The
picture support uses a simple picture support package rather than
content repository, so it is a bit non-standard.  But I plan to upload
both the simple-pictures package and the picture-enabled Simple Survey
package when I've finished tidying and fixing bugs.

It would be sensible to cooperate on Simple Survey, assuming it's
possible to write a package that works on both ACS Tcl and OpenACS.
Or at the very least, you should take 0.2.1 as a basis for porting.

(I've been sending electronic mail to discuss Simple Survey, so this
posting is more 'for the record'.)

Basically 0.2.1 is bugfixes for 0.2 to make it work with ACS Tcl 4.2.
Removed the call to bt_mergepiece, used templating for the user
pages, a couple of other bugfixes.

I have a new version of Simple Survey, not yet uploaded to the
repository, which allows pictures as well as text for questions and
responses.

> I'm sitting at a c@p site (canada public internet access site) in Nova Scotia, thought I'd check in to see what's up ...

I am very jealous :) One of my favorite memories is when I took a 5 week motorcycle trip through northeast us and 6 canada provinces. My favorite part of the trip was Cape Breton in Nova Scotia. If you have the time be sure to take the whale cruise with the one armed captain it is well worth it. Also Moose lake in the highlands plateau often holds many a moose at the shores at night. Enjoy the view.

Ed has kindly provided me with several pieces of code including the improved survey simple package.  While it won't get ported into this round of releases (at least not the pre-test version) we'll make use of it before too long.