[albatross-users] Macro and links?

[Cameron Blackwood]

Andrew McNamara writes:
  |
  | >
  | >	<al-input type="text" name="remove" expr="<al-usearg name="arg1">">
  | >
  | >which will do what I think it is you are trying to achieve!
  | 
  | I don't think you can nest albatross tags like this - the parser isn't
  | sophisticated enough.

I tinkered round and this worked:

<al-input type="text" name="remove" expr="<al-usearg name="arg1">">

but this didnt:

<al-input type="text" name="remove" expr="<al-usearg>">

So I took that as a sign that I was doing the wrong thing and I
abandoned the macro way of doing it. :)

  | 
  | Macro's aren't function calls, more's the pity. Sooner or later we're
  | going to have to do something a little fancier - I want to make the
  | "disabled" or "size" attributes on an <al-input> determined under
  | application control, and you can't currently do that.

Yeah, I had a brainfart and somehow linked macros with functions. :-0

My problem today was that I had a list of items of the form:
   [ unique_id_number, non_unique_string ]
and I wanted to have a nice neat little delete button (but a delete 
button that was tied to the id_number _AND_ the string). In the end I 
ended up using....

<al-if expr="tuples">
  <ul>
    <al-for iter="i" expr="tuples">
      <li>ID:<b><al-value expr="i.value()[0]"></b>
          string data:<tt><al-value expr="i.value()[1]"></tt>
          <al-input type="submit" nameexpr="'removetuple_%s' % (i.value()[0],)" value="remove">
          <al-input type="hidden" nameexpr="'data_removetuple_%s' % (i.value()[0],)" expr="base64.encodestring(cPickle.dumps(i.value()))">
          </br>
    </al-for>
  </ul>
</al-if>

In this way I have a removetuple_ID and then a hidden value that I can
extract the string from.

My app then searches through dir(ctx.locals) for anything of the form
'removetuple_XXX' and search for the data_removetuple_XXX which is the
base64 encoded pickle of the string.

It's ugly, but it works fine and it means that I can delete with ID
and string without rereading my database again. (Dont ask :)



What I learnt today:
--------------------
  * dont use macros for anything that is at all programatic or complex.
  * you need to base64 encode the pickle string or you'll be hitting
    your head a lot :) because it wont unpickle, but it looks like a
    pickle string until you look real close ;)
  * once you get over some of the confusing bits, you remember that
    albatross rocks :)


  | Andrew McNamara, Senior Developer, Object Craft
cam

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