Re: Serializing VelocityContext

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 07:38:11 -0700

I understand, and I appreciate the suggestion, however... I can already enumerate the context within Java without the need of an additional tool. 

Object[] keys = context.getKeys();
for (Object o : keys) {
        String key = (String) o;
        Object value = context.get(key);
}
The goal is to have a re-useable (as needed) context object... something that can be loaded outside of the context of a web application. We don't need to just build these for fun, it would be a per-request situation when the web developer needs to mock up a page/ design they are working on. Our templates are meaningless without the context, and that is tied to live data sources. The editing tool we're trying to design should not, for instance, need to fire up Hibernate and connect to a database to put flesh on the bones. Much easier to have "saved" contexts, something that can represent some stage in the display, with all the context objects intact without the overhead of being a web application container. 

Thanks again for the suggestion.

Cheers,

J --

On Aug 27, 2008, at 7:44 AM, White, Tim wrote:
The tool will let you enumerate everything in the Context, so you could serialize it manually from inside the Velocity template. Still not clear 100% what you are trying to do, just tossing out ideas on how you can enumerate the Context w/o it being necessarily Serializable. 

________________________________

From: Jason Chodakowski [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tue 8/26/2008 9:41 PM
To: Velocity Users List
Subject: Re: Serializing VelocityContext



Hmm... perhaps I didn't explain that well, but the ContextTool won't
help me serialize the VelocityContext to disk... at least as far as I
can tell by looking at the source and the documentation... for that
matter ContextTool itself isn't serializeable so if it were in
something I was trying to write to disk, it would throw an exception.

Unless of course I'm not understanding its use as you meant it.

Thanks,

J --

On Aug 26, 2008, at 9:38 PM, White, Tim wrote:


This isn't a complete answer, but you might take a look at the
ContextTool.

________________________________

From: Jason Chodakowski [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tue 8/26/2008 8:11 PM
To: Velocity Users List
Subject: Serializing VelocityContext



Greetings,

I'm throwing this out there because I'm just not cool or smart enough
to come up with a better way of doing what I'm going to describe...
I'm hoping someone has a better idea.

My company has an ongoing webish effort which makes extensive use of
Velocity. As more folks start to use our stuff, one of the
overwhelming questions we get is, "How can I get a WYSIWYG view of
your templates so that I can edit them." The difficulty in this is due 
to our templates being highly nested - one template may load (parse)
four or more templates depending on what's in the Context. Then
there's also the issue of the Context, which in our case is the soul
of any rendered page.

We are working on some solutions to this. The path that we're
currently on would do the following:

By adding something onto the URL (we're using serialize=true) we
wanted to write the entire Context of a given request/response to
disk... that way an web-editor-type could use our widget to gather a
fully-formed Context, loaded from disk, without needing live
connections to a database, an application server container, etc. to
view an assembled/parsed page - just a small Java program which can
load that Object from disk, and then do a mergeTemplate type action to 
produce completed HTML for the editor-of-choice.

I'm sure you know then where this is going... VelocityContext is not
serializable, and neither are many of the VelocityTools that we put
into the Context. We are contemplating creating a completely
serialized version of the Velocity source tree, including tools -
mostly because there's not much to do beyond implementing
Serializable. Now I'm not requesting that the Velocity team do this
for us unless they're already working on something similar, but I just 
don't know a better way to do it. I'm aware that Hibernate or perhaps
something else under the JBoss umbrella can serialize non-serialized
objects, but I can't find out exactly where this is addressed or how
it is fixed... Hibernate, for instance does a lot of internal code
altering to make their stuff work, and while I'm very impressed at how 
that all works, there is a massive startup overhead associated with
recompilation that we don't want to incur. We were shooting for
something "simple" - I know, it's never "that" simple.
In many ways it all boils down to time... we need to solve our problem quickly, but I'm hoping perhaps someone else on this list, who is more 
clever than I am, has addressed this issue or one like it.

Let me know if I need to explain more.

Thanks,

Jason Chodakowski





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