Re: [Openinteract-help] Using several content-generators for one action?

[Heiko K. <Hei...@gm...>]

Hmmm,

declaring a different action for a different content-generator is a
rather technical than user-friendly solution. I guess we will end up
with something like:

[foo]
content-generator = TT

[foo_soap]
content-generator = SOAP

[foo_wap]
content-genertor = WAP

[foo_pdf]
content-genertor = GS-PDF


and we will have to write a lots of stuff for each of these action.
Since a action is more of a class or namespace for a method, I don't see
why it needs to include the content generator.

[foo_soap] needs a SOAP response and request generator. The soap API
user will think its very strange that all namespaces have _soap included.

[foo_pdf] and [foo_wap] will most likely have a request for something
ending with .pdf as an ending. (At least, nobody would think it's
strange when you require this.)


Without having looked closely at the code yet, I would make the request
generator determine the content-type. After setting some default (most
likely to .html), when the request ends with .pdf to pdf and with .wap
to wap. SOAP has a different request-generator, so it will be very easy
to set the content-type to soap there.

The only situation, where you will need different actions is when you
want to present the same content-type (html) with different
html-content-generators - IMHO not a very common situation in
production. (In testing, sure this will happen, but for test-pages I
want to have the possibilty to switch between foo_TT and foo_HTMLTemplate.)

So, if it makes sense, it is a feature request to implement several
content-generator determined by content-type per action:
[foo]
content-generator default = TT
content-generator soap = SOAP
content-generator pdf = GS-PDF
...
(don't know if this is parseable by the .ini-reader)

Best regards,

Heiko

Chris Winters wrote:
>>I'm currently trying out Martin Kutters SOAP add on for OpenInteract2.
>>My idea is to use soap as remote API for OI2. Thus I would like to have
>>two content-generators for all packages, one giving the usual
>>html-response, and the other one giving a soap response.
> 
> 
> That's been my idea for SOAP as well.
> 
> 
>>When I understand the current implementation of OI correct, then it is
>>in principle possible to have several content generators in OI, but one
>>action has exactly one content generator, defined by the action.ini
>>file, not by the Response-type. I hope I'm wrong with this assumption,
>>so my question is, how do I enable different content-generators for one
>>action? Or is my understanding of an 'action' wrong?
> 
> 
> Your understanding is right. But I think what's missing is you can map
> multiple action specifications to the same class. For instance in an
> action.ini you might have:
> 
> [foo]
> class = OpenInteract2::Action::Foo
> content_generator = TT
> 
> [bar]
> class = OpenInteract2::Action::Foo
> content_generator = SOAP
> 
> The same data are retrieved from the action + task, but they're passed off
> to a different content generator depending on how they were invoked. Make
> sense?
> 
> The 'news' package has some commented-out examples of doing this with
> Text::Template and HTML::Template.
> 
> 
>>And in some packages, I haven't seen the content_generator flag in the
>>action.ini. Where is the default defined?
> 
> 
> In server.ini:
> 
> [action_info default]
> controller         = tt-template
> content_generator  = TT
> 
> Hope this helps,
> 
> Chris
>