Forum OpenACS Development: Response to bt_mergepiece?? Templating

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Posted by Ed Avis on
(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.