Forum OpenACS Q&A: ad_return_complaint and templating

At civilution.com, we hacked ad_header and footer to each
source master.tcl and parse the upper and lower half of
master.adp respectively.  I am out  of the office until tues, if you
email me then, I'll post the code/mail it to you.

Cheers,

Hamilton, you'll want to look at the "returning pages in chunks" thread. Scroll down to my Aug. 28 post, and you'll see an example of doing exactly what Carl is talking about, above. That example is doing it on a Tcl page, but the only difference for putting it into an ad_header like proc might be how you decide which master template(s) to use.

I think you are making it more complicated than it needs to be.

All the ad_return_whatever procs should ditch ad_header and ad_footer and call instead ad_return_template /path/to/global/notices/whatever-notice and templates etc. will be cake. (the path you'll have to work out yourself, because I'm lazy)

Notices should probably live under acs-subsite/global.

Yeah, just set a variable $the_error and use it in the template as @the_error@

I finally got it. Actually my colleague helped me with it. But for some time I found that validations in the ad_page_contract kept on reurning "Zero sized Reply".

This is how my friend Mello programmed it.

set error_message " "
proc_doc ad_return_complaint {exception_count exception_text} "Return a page complaining about the user's input (as opposed to an error in our software, for which ad_return_error is more appropriate)" {
    global error_message
    if { $exception_count == 1 } {
	set problem_string "a problem"
	set please_correct "it"
    } else {
	set problem_string "some problems"
	set please_correct "them"
    }
    set error_message $exception_text
    ad_return_template /www/templates/error 
}

...where /www/templates/error is a template which displays error_message in a manner which conforms to our site's designs (in other words it uses the master template).

However, I found that ad-page contract validations like notnull on variables returns a zero sized reply when calling ad_page contract programmed as above.

I made a little modification

proc_doc ad_return_complaint {exception_count exception_text} "Return a page complaining about the user's input (as opposed to an error in our software, for which ad_return_error is more appropriate)" {
    global error_message
    if { $exception_count == 1 } {
	set problem_string "a problem"
	set please_correct "it"
    } else {
	set problem_string "some problems"
	set please_correct "them"
    }
    set error_message $exception_text
    doc_return 200 text/html [template::adp_parse  [template::util::url_to_file "/www/templates/error" [ad_conn file]] {}] 
}

The later seems to have corrected the error I was experiencing.

Thanks to everyone for responding .....

I recently snuck in a new template routine called "ad_return_exception_template" which allows for templated error messages and terminates processing to boot.

At the moment the only error template in acs-subsite/www/shared is "db-error.adp", designed to return a templated version of the "we had a database error" style error message.

Janine Sisk has written a couple of other simple templates for returning the "complaint" style errors.  She'll get this in the development branch soon.

I was going to wait until she was finished and committed the work before telling folks about this.