On Sunday, February 28, 2016 at 2:31:47 PM UTC-8, Mat wrote:
>
> Eric - thank you for a very informative and 'solving' reply! :-)
> ...
> It is depressing to realize that this basic problem is something that 
> requires special js code and I therefore simply *cannot* solve myself 
> (and this after hours and hours of trying different circumventions). 
>

It's not really "special js code".  The <$count> widget has much more 
involved js code than this tiny filter does.... and certainly less code 
than would be needed to extend the core macro processing to "evaluate" the 
macro output and extract a return value from the result.  You should think 
of the "count" filter as merely an add-on enhancement to the set of filters 
you have available.

The real problem you encountered is that the "count" filter isn't in the 
standard core set of filters, so you were looking for a workaround based on 
re-purposing existing features (i.e., the $count widget).  However, I think 
what you are trying to "kill a fly with a sledgehammer."  You are proposing 
that we radically extend the purpose and behavior of the macro mechanism on 
a system-wide basis, just so you can re-use an existing widget in a way 
that widgets aren't intended to be used.

I'm also wondering how such an extended macro processor would handle 
refresh events?  To "evaluate and return" macro content, the core 
processing would need to generate a separate, temporary parse tree for the 
macro content (after substitution of params and variables), extract the 
"output value" from the tree and then discard the parse tree before 
returning the extracted content.  The problem here is that without 
preserving the parse tree, there's no way to know that there are widgets 
*inside* the macro that need to be refreshed.

In my opinion, this entire approach seems like it would be a "can of 
worms", creating more problems than it solves.

-e

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