Re: Re: [Webmacro-devel] Whitespace :(

[Keats <ke...@su...>]

You're absolutely write and we've agonized over this on and off for years.  But no really great solutions have been put forward.

I have suggested a directive, like #trim that could do things like trim all leading whitespace, trim all trailing whitespace, trim all leading and trailing whitespace, trim a fixed amount of leading whitespace, etc.  

Nobody seemed very excited about this.  Maybe your Ignition framework will renew interest in this.

Another idea I had was to specifiy a "leader" char, like a dot leader which would be eaten from the begining of each line.  

Any of these sound useful to you?

Keats

-------Original Message-------
From: Marc Palmer <ma...@an...>
Sent: 08/01/03 11:05 AM
To: ke...@ea..., web...@li...
Subject: Re: [Webmacro-devel] Whitespace :(

> 
> On Fri, 1 Aug 2003 10:19:10 -0400 (GMT), Keats <ke...@su...> wrote:

> Marc,
>
> It's really not as bad as you're making it out to be.  The only known 
> bugs with whitespace handling are the implicit #begin and #end problems. 
 
> You can avoid this altogether by using curly braces when you need
precise 
> control of whitespace.
>
> The rules are a bit complex, but they were hashed out exhaustively and 
> there is some logic behind them.
>
> If you have a specific case that's giving you trouble I'd be glad to
take 
> a look.

Thanks, that's very kind. My point is though that this shouldn't be 
necessary!

The trouble is that the templates have to end up looking really ugly (for 
plain text formatted output), and most people who are not hardcore WM
users 
will get extremely confused by the (I'm sure very logical) rules used and 
how they have to position things to get their results.

I'm just wondering if there's some other way to approach this. For example 

I've written a pretty next text formatting helper to reduce these problems 
- 
 but it requires calls $textHelper.write( string) for everything if you 
want it to work.

Here's an example of that template I showed before, which now produces 
reasonable output - although I would like an indent on every field line of 

the SQL output:

#macro SQLType( $field)
    #set $class = $field.ConstraintProperty.ClassName
    #if ($class == "java.lang.String") #begin  
VARCHAR($field.ConstraintProperty.MaxLength) #end
    #elseif ($class == "java.util.Date") #begin  DATE #end
    #else #begin $field.DataType.Name #end
#end

<h2>Generator for SQL CREATE TABLE based on Metalizer Schema</h2>

<h3>SQL follows:</h3>

#set $schema = $Ignition.getSchema($Ignition.FieldValue.schemaName)
<pre>
CREATE TABLE tablename (

#set $first = true
#foreach $group in $schema.FieldGroups
#begin
#foreach $fieldName in $schema.getFieldNamesInGroup($group)
    #begin
    #if (!$first) #begin ,
#end
    #set $field = $schema.getField($fieldName)
$field.Name  #SQLType($field) #if ($field.ConstraintProperty.Required) 
#begin  NOT NULL #end #set $first = false #end
#end

);
</pre>


There are all kinds of hacks required - blocks all on one line which are 
very nasty for long lines, #end(s) at the beginning of the next line 
instead of indented properly so you don't get the extra spaces included
and 
so on.

I really do appreciate the complexity and intentions behind the current 
scheme. In theory, if you want everything to be on one line you should
have 
one long line of code. You -can- get around the nastiness of that by 
avoiding directives on the line, having set their results into variables 
before rendering the line and so on.

I know that there are contradictions too... in one sense we don't want WS 
to be eaten, so output placement is predictable, but at the same time we 
want to be able to indent code to produce readable source.

I just think... there has to be a better way, especially as we are 
promoting WM as something that is not just for HTML.

If I had to hand a WM app to somebody for them to write plain text 
templates (say for emails) I would be nuts - $xxx and #if are one thing to 

explain, precise positioning rules are another.

$0.02

-- 
Marc Palmer
Contract Java Consultant/Developer
   	   	   	
                        w a n g j a m m e r s

                 java and web software design
              experts with an ethical outlook

                   http://www.wangjammers.org



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