Forum OpenACS Improvement Proposals (TIPs): Re: Enhance <multiple> to enable locally-aliased and implicit multirow reference styles.

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2: Re: Enhance <multiple> to enable locally-aliased and implicit multirow reference styles. (response to 1)
Posted by Brian Fenton on 02/13/14 06:29 PM
Hi Andrew

I think it's a good idea, but it strikes me that the real benefit it provides is the possiblity of aliasing the multirow to "". I imagine that most people would just use that (e.g. @.name@ in your example), and probably never the other ways, as it's much terser.

Unlikely in practice, but hypothetically what happens if there's an existing multirow element called .name?

Supporting nesting would be critical I think.

cheers
Brian

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4: Re: Enhance <multiple> to enable locally-aliased and implicit multirow reference styles. (response to 2)
Posted by Andrew Helsley on 02/13/14 09:49 PM

Brian,

Regardless of the changes, a multirow column called .name would be handled in the same way as is currently done: you'd have to double the period:

@foo..name@
@..name@

If you are referring to the name of the multirow itself, the built-in regular expression before (and after) this change is not able to handle:

@.name.foo@

… because the regexp clause:

(^|[^\\])@([a-zA-Z0-9_:]+)\.

… will not accept a period anywhere between the @ and the . that separates the multirow name from the column name.

Nesting in the face of multirow name conflicts is uncommon, but it can be supported in a similar fashion to the existing support for nesting.

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regards,
Andy