Comments on: Introducing the Proton Template Engine

By: jrbriggs

jrbriggs — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 09:10:23 +0000

You understand correctly, but the same code can be used for both templates. Assuming either template has been loaded, this will work:


tmp.repeat('list', 2)
for x in range(1, 3):
    tmp.setelement('listid', str(x), x)
    tmp.setattribute('listid', 'id', str(x), x)
    tmp.setelement('listval', 'my item %s' % x, x)

The engine won’t add an attribute where one doesn’t already exist in the template — so the setattribute call won’t affect the xhtml. I’ve added an example with assertions to source control if you’re interested in taking a look:
http://proton-te.googlecode.com/hg/python/test/twotemplates.py

By: Paul

Paul — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 18:01:28 +0000

If I understand your post correctly, the code would be different for each template anyway. The XML example would require a setelement() and a setattribute() call, while the XHTML example requires two setelement() calls.

By: jrbriggs

jrbriggs — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 09:40:09 +0000

Flexibility, basically. I used to have a good example of this, but I’ve forgotten it, so here’s a completely contrived example. Suppose you have 2 templates, one which is plain xml and one which is xhtml. The input to both is the same, so you should be able to use the same code to populate/render output…

Plain xml template:

Final output:

my item 1
my item 2

Xhtml template:

VALUE

Final output:

ID	1	VALUE	my item 1
ID	2	VALUE	my item 2

Without separating the setting of attribute values from element values, you wouldn’t be able to use the same code for both the above templates — or at the very least, you’d have to add logic to the code which is ‘aware’ of the content of the templates (which I’d like to avoid).

PS. You could end up with 4 ‘id’ attributes on an element: id, eid, rid, aid. The latter 3 are stripped on output, but in any case, it’s no more annoying than your average JSF monstrosity… or other templating systems with screeds of code. IMHO of course.

By: Paul

Paul — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 04:53:07 +0000

Why does the require both an ‘eid’ and an ‘aid’? I’m curious why can’t you use eid for both purposes.

In many sistuations, the element will also have an ‘id’ attribute. Does that mean you will end up having three ‘id’ attributes? That’s going to be a bit annoying isn’t it?