[albatross-users] al-for and Template frustration and confusion

[Sheila King]

Oh, I'm having a bit of fun today trying to work on templates. Or, not-fun, 
rather.

I have a navigation bar with tabs for may application, and it appears in 
every page, and I finally got to the point where I wanted to make it into a 
macro. The navbar has two different views, depending on whether the client 
is logged in (authenticated) or not (anonymous).

And the number of tabs is different in the two versions.

So, a macro with an al-for seemed like the best idea for this.

My understanding of the al-for iteration is

<al-for iter="i" expr="iterobj">

blah blah blah
</al-for>

that iterobj, as shown above, must be some sort of object over which one 
can iterate. A list-type object should fit the bill here, yes? And then "i" 
is one object in the iterobj data-structure.

Well, I have no idea why the following is failing...and I have tried a 
number of things, none of which has worked, but this last attempt it seemed 
to me SHOULD.

Here is a portion of my macro, with an ** at the beginning of the problem 
line:

-----------------------------------------
<al-macro name="tabbed_navbar">

<table width="100%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
  <tr align="left">

<al-if expr="_authstatus == 'auth'">
<al-exec expr="
tabnames = ['Main', 'Contact Info', 'Billing', 'Services']
tablinks = ['main', 'contactinfo', 'billing', 'services']
tabiter = range(4)
">
<al-else>

<al-exec expr="
tabnames = ['Login', 'Create Login', 'Lost Password']
tablinks = ['login', 'createlogin', 'lostpassword']
tabiter = range(3)
">

</al-if>

<al-for iter="i" expr="tabiter">
**<al-exec expr="
import os
linkurl = '/'.join(os.environ['SCRIPT_NAME'], tablinks[i])
">

...rest of macro omitted...
----------------------------------------------

Now the line

**<al-exec expr="

is where the error message occurs (obviously, the ** is not present in the 
actual copy which I am running).

I am getting a parse error which essentially tells me:

"TypeError: sequence index must be integer"

The problem as far as I can see, is actually occurring two lines below, 
where I use the following expression:

tablinks[i]

The "i" being used as an index on tablinks is for some reason not being 
interpreted to be an integer.

How it could not be an integer is beyond me. I have constructed
numtabs = range(4)

which is certainly a list in which each item is an integer. If I iterate 
over such a list, each item in the list must be an integer????

Well, I've been trying for a couple of hours now to solve this problem on 
this one line. If there is something really stupid I'm doing here, I sure 
would like to know. :/

-- 
Sheila King
http://www.thinkspot.net/sheila/
http://www.k12groups.org