RE: [FreeMarker-user] FW: crud screens and null.

[Payne, M. <Pay...@pe...>]

So support the "!"

To express is much simpler.  In addition it allows the author to say "it =
might be null, but I do not care".

-----Original Message-----
From: fre...@li... =
[mailto:fre...@li...]On Behalf Of Daniel =
Dekany
Sent: Tuesday, May 02, 2006 9:26 AM
To: Jonathan Revusky
Subject: Re: [FreeMarker-user] FW: crud screens and null.

Tuesday, May 2, 2006, 2:26:50 PM, Jonathan Revusky wrote:

[snip]
>> In practice, we have objects with null properties and that's okay.
>> Using ?default/?exists is sometimes more tedious than the error
>> freemarker is trying to prevent.  Why not allow "!"  e.g=20
>> $!{foo.prop.fieldx} and just print nothing if the
>
> Well, as you have intuited, we tend to think that this is a coding
> antipattern, and as such, aren't that eager to encourage it via more
> convenient notation.
>
> I'm loath to tell people how to do things OTOH, but my sense of things
> is that you would be better off if you managed to restructure your =
data
> model (I don't mean radically) such that you have a sensible default
> value rather than null. That user.getNotes() or something like that
> returns an empty string rather than null if nobody has actually =
entered
> any notes seems perfectly reasonable and would get around the whole =
problem.
[snip]

My standpoint on this problem is that while the template language
should not do arbitrary things when it sees a null value, so the user
should be forced to explicitly specify a default value, discouraging
people using null-s in the data-model (by having verbose existence
handling built-ins for example) was a failed attempt. Simply, we was
unable to provide a practically usable way of wrapping the "business
logic" objects in a way that the null-s will not be present. As a
result, it think, almost everybody extensively uses existence
built-ins in their templates.

--
Best regards,
 Daniel Dekany



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