[Openinteract-help] Returning a parsed TT template through OI.comp

[Teemu <te...@io...>]

Hi,

I spent quite some time today to figure out how to process a template for a 
return value while calling an OI component.

Basically, I try to create a OI component that returns the browser specific 
CSS for every site. I have the following in base_main:

[% OI.comp('ua_select_css') %]

With this I will call an action called ua_select_css (in class 
OpenInteract::Handler::UserAgent), which detects the client browser and feeds 
the ua_select_css template with params {browser => $browser}.

ua_select_css looks something like this:

[%- IF browser == 'ie' -%]
        [% PROCESS stylesheet style = '/link_rel/?link=ie.css' %]
[%- ELSIF browser == 'moz' -%]
        [% PROCESS stylesheet style = '/link_rel/?link=moz.css' %]
[%- ELSIF browser == 'opera' -%]
        [% PROCESS stylesheet style = '/link_rel/?link=opera.css' %]
[%- END -%]

link_rel is just an action that returns the generated CSS2 stylesheet with 
correct content-type etc. If my browser is IE, the above TT code will produce 
the following output:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/link_rel/?link=ie.css" />

Now my problem is how to retrieve ua_select_css (while in 
OpenInteract::Handler::UserAgent->ua_select_css), process it and return the 
processed output to base_main.

I tried the following:

sub ua_select_css {
....
return $R->template->handler( {}, $params, 
                                  { name => 'my_base::ua_select_css' } );
}

But it didn't work. Some strange error ended up in error_log and OI ceased to 
function:

 --EXITED WITH ERROR from main handler eval block
Error: Cannot process template!file error - Template with name [javascript] 
not found.

[javascript] should be a [% BLOCK javascript %] in my base_main, which makes 
me wonder why it was not found...

Ok. I browsed the OpenInteract::Template::Process code for help and tried the 
following (in place of template->handler):

	my $output;
	my $template = $R->template->initialize;
	$template->process( 'my_base::ua_select_css', $params, \$output );
 	return $output;

It worked! Now I ask, why didn't template->handler work through a component 
call? Is the above method I used correct or is there a better way to do this?

Also, I noticed a problem in Pod documentation of 
OpenInteract::Template::Process:

initialize( \%config )

initialize method doesn't know anything about parameters, so I wonder why 
\%config is specified in the usage instructions. %config could actually be 
very nice for initialize if I could pass some parameters to Template->new() 
through it. Something like:

my $template = $R->template->initialize(TRIM => 1);

Would enable TT to trim generated output. Is there currently a way to do this?

-- 
Sincerely,

Teemu Arina

http://www.mimerdesk.org