Grzegorz Kossakowski skrev:
Daniel Fagerstrom pisze:
Grzegorz Kossakowski skrev:
Daniel Fagerstrom pisze:
...
I had a feeling that there is much more besides Date/Number/Currency
formatting but now I think that I was suffering from over-generalization
problem. The converter concept is that simple how you describe it but
it's not wrong because it solves very concrete problem.
Nothing spectacular this time ;) But improving usability is consists
mainly of lots of small improvements.
Now I think that I fully get the idea and we can focus on discussing how
to implement it.
Anyway, say that you have a couple of dates in your model bean that
you would like to render on a web page using CTemplate. Then you
currently would need to write something like (haven't checked the
details):
<jx:formatDate value="${myobj.startDate}" dateStyle="short"
locale="${cocoon.request.locale}">
for each date. That is of course quite OK to write, but it clearly
clutters the code, and it is not that obvious for a non developer.
With converters it would be more like:
${myobj.startDate#short}
and
${myobj.startDate}
Personally, I prefer ${myboject.startDate}#short syntax because choosing
converter should not be part of expression (it would be hard to
distinguish where expression part ends and converter name begins in some
cases). The syntax would also imply that conversion is performed after
obtaining value (object) by evaluating the exception.
That would be the case if expressions with converter variant modifiers
only was used alone as attribute values. But remember that expressions
in CTemplate can be embeded in text as well, e.g.:
<p>The start date is ${myobj.startDate#short}.</p>
In such cases having the modifier outside the expression would be harder
to parse. We chose '#' as a separator as it didn't seem to have any
significant meaning in the expression languages we had in mind when the
converters where discussed. We can always introduce some escaping
mechanism "##" e.g. for cases when a literal '#' is needed as part of an
expression.
/Daniel
