Forum OpenACS Development: New templating tag

The ACS templating system has a reasonable number of tags. One tag is called 'include' and is used to include another adp template in the current template. Unfortunately, you have to pass all the variables and values to the sub-template, so it is not very convenient.

It turns out to be fairly easy to add new tags. I added a tag called 'read', for lack of a better name. What it does is to read a sub-template and include it into the current template, without the need to pass any variables. It also works recursively. Here is the code, which should be placed in acs-templating/tcl/tag-init.tcl:

template_tag read { params } {

  set source [ns_set iget $params src]
  if {![string match "absolute" [file pathtype $source]]} { 
    set source [ns_normalizepath [ad_conn adp_root]/$source]
  }
		
  set chunk [template::util::read_file $source]
  template::adp_compile_chunk $chunk
}

Problems include the fact that compiled templates are cached. Only the mtime of the parent adp is used to determine if the template is up-to-date. On a stable system, this should not be a problem. For development, however, you need to touch parent.adp You can use the tag as follows:

If using a relative path, you need to set ad_conn(adp_root) to something useful:

global ad_conn
set ad_conn(adp_root) "/absolute/path/to"

Actually all the vars available in the parent are available in the child, That was the intent! The tag reads the file and evaluates it as if it were in the current file.

However, it looks like adp tags (<% %>) do not get evaluated in the child. I don't know why this is, but you can use the templating 'tcl' tag instead.

Unfortunately the include tag doesn't work like that. To pass in arrays (to a multiple tag) you have to prepend & to the array name. The upvaring is done in a parse proc that takes into account the level, which isn't always 1.