I am working on yet another templating system (yeah, I know, but the ratio of web frameworks to templating systems has just gotten too high). Its primary focus is not really the web, although it would be nice to make it "just work" on the web, as well.
With that in mind, I thought I would make sure that I could easily support the TurboGears/Buffet plugin architecture, but after reading the documentation at http://www.turbogears.org/docs/plugins/template.html, I have several questions. (Disclaimer: I haven't used TurboGears, although I have used CherryPy in the past, so these questions are from the perspective of somebody who is just reading this documentation webpage, who has not been steeped in TurboGears lore and practices. If the answers are't too self-evident to TurboGearHeads, perhaps the doc page could be updated...) Questions on the example YourPlugin class: 1. In __init__(), it specifies that "the options should be prefixed with the engine's scheme name...". Is this prefixing done with a colon, or a period, or any separator at all? (I thought I saw both dots and colons used to separate prefixes for various different purposes in the TurboGears docs.) 2. In render(), the "template" parameter is not described. Is this the same as the load_template() "templatename" parameter, or is it an actual template, as returned by load_template()? (The documentation would appear to indicate it is not the latter, but then why isn't it clearly named "templatename" like the load_template() parameter?) The default is "None" -- is "None" ever passed in, and if so what should the function do with it -- use the result of the most recent call to load_template()? 3. I guess some of my confusion (about what happens in question 2) revolves around the lack of discussion about the use of the YourPlugin class by the system. Is it instantiated once? Once per thread? Once per template used? 4. I assume that render() should return a string. This is certainly implied by the docstring comment, but is not spelled out in black and white. 5. Template context data is defined in two ways -- the info parameter passed to render(), and by calling the optional extra_vars_func(). a. Is the template engine allowed to modify the dictionary returned from extra_vars_func? b. Is the template engine allowed to modify the info parameter dictionary? (e.g. by adding __builtins__) c. If there is a name collision between these two dictionaries, which one takes precedence? d. Although the fact that extra_vars_func() should be called on every render() is documented at __init__(), this should probably be reinforced at the documentation for render(). 6. How is the result from the transform() method used? (e.g. directly by TurboGears, or by piping it back into the templating package?) If it's the latter, does the transform() method have to return an elementtree representation, or could it return some other representation which is meaningful to the templating package and efficient to generate and use? Additional questions: 7. In the setup.py entry point section it shows "schemename = yourpackage.yourmodule:YourPluginClass". I would assume that it should really be "yourschemename" as well, but I hate making those kinds of assumptions. 8. There is scant discussion on caching templates. Should they always be cached? How are stale templates flushed out of the cache? I was under the impression from something I read earlier that changing a template would cause TurboGears to reload, but I don't see anything in the interface for this. Thanks in advance for any light you can shed on these issues. Regards, Pat --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TurboGears" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/turbogears -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
