Forum OpenACS Development: Templatig system questions

Hello guys

As most of you might now already, Greenpeace has been working on moving several of it's sites to ACS 4.2 TCL (why not OpenACS, well, we started several month ago and OpenACS 4 was not yet a reality and aD was still supporting TCL versions and so on and so on, anyway, everything has been done as APM packages -suggested by Don Baccus, THANKS!- so we could port, once we have a working version, to OpenACS pretty much straight forward).

I am messing around with a small series of administrative tasks that I would like to add to the administration of the acs- lang package and I started to look into the templating system. I remember some posts about the form creation and so on but can't find them again... Have anyone been looking into that? I am just asking to make sure that I am not going into a dead-end with that and that it could be ported to OpenACS or that I could take the acs-templating from OpenACS more or less directly

Our programming agency didn't use the templating from acs- templating (AFAIK) so I am the first one to look into it. Any suggestion or recommendation is welcome.

As always, I am trying to find some free time to start beeing more active on the BBOARD of OpenACS because I believe there are many VERY bright and interesting people in this community and it's an honor to be part of it.

Cheers and thanks in advance.

I also have been using template::form::* stuff recently, and have found it very useful. It enables you to build complex multistage forms pretty quickly.

My only gripe is that when I tried to extend the system with new widgets and auto confirmation, new templates etc., I discovered upvar hell!

Still, if you're not planning to extend it, that won't be a problem for you...

The templating Tcl procs that don't involve hitting the database will drop into OpenACS 4.2 unchanged.  Yes, I'm interested, we should be putting out correct HTML and getting the form handler and templating code to emit it will be a big step in the right direction.

Nested if/else tags can become very ugly... Fortunately ACS comes with an elseif tag! Unfortunately it's broken...

In acs-templating/tcl/tag-procs.tcl, change line 52 from:

  append condition "} {"
  template::adp_append_code $condition

to

  append condition "} {"
  switch $condition_type {
      if     {template::adp_append_code $condition}
      elseif {template::adp_append_code $condition -nobreak}
  }