Re: [FMPP] Couple newbie questions

[Erich O. <er...@va...>]

Daniel Dekany wrote:

>Friday, October 8, 2004, 4:31:16 PM, Erich Oliphant wrote:
>
>  
>
>>Hi,
>>I am using FMPP w/ Ant to create a installer for our application.  
>>Working pretty good so far but have a couple issues:
>>
>>1) We've using the ant XMLProperty to create Ant properties based on XML 
>>config files.  This is great for us, as we have lots of config items and 
>>grouping them hierarchically is convienient.  The problem, of course, is 
>>that ant properties of the form 'parent.property' are a problem for 
>>FMPP/Freemarker since ${parent.property} tries to resolve 'parent' then 
>>'property' as a child.  I read the FM docs regarding the 
>>${.vars["parent.property"]} syntax to get around the problem.  That 
>>works but is syntactically clunky.  Is there a cleaner way to do this?
>>    
>>
>
>No... This is actually a FreeMarker syntax issue, although I don't blame
>FreeMarker for this.
>
Yeah understand it's not necessarily a bad thing from an FM point of 
view. Just like item 2, it's really only an issue when you are trying to 
do generic text proc'ing on top of it ;)

>
>  
>
>>2) Some of the files that we are configuring are Unix shell scripts.  In 
>>some cases the ${SHELL_VAR} form for shell variables is used, and the 
>>FMPP processing throws an error when it hits one of these as they are 
>>not defined.  This becomes a tricky problem as it's nice to know from an 
>>FMPP perspective that I've hit an undefined variable reference, but in 
>>this case I'd like to maybe log, the undefined var and keep processing.  
>>Or is there some way to define an alternate variable resolution syntax 
>>for FMPP/Freemarker?  This is a Java web application were building so we 
>>are going to run into the same problem with Java Expression Language 
>>variables that use the ${} form as well.
>>    
>>
>
>That's an issue with FreeMarker (again), namely that it doesn't allow
>the configuration of its syntax. I know this is a real problem for
>general purpose file preprocessors, because so many other formats use
>${exp}... Currently you can write ${'$'}{SHELL_VAR}, which is obviously
>terrible if you have to do it frequently. A workaround would be to
>replace all @{...}-s with ${...}, and all ${...} with ${'$'}{...} when
>FMPP loads the template files, thus simulate that the FreeMarker
>interpolation syntax is @{exp}. That slows things down a little bit,
>also possibly distorts the column number in error messages, but I guess
>that would be better than nothing. What do you think?
>
Sounds good to me :)  You have any sample code/expressions that would 
illustrate this  ?

>
>  
>