[Catalyst] A View that may include elements optionally returned from other funcs

[Lee Standen]

Hi Steve,

That's the kind of logic that you'd normally handle with your template. 
  In TT you can [% INCLUDE "filename" %] to make the site in any way you 
like, which is why it is more popular.

 From what I can see, HTML::Seamstress requires you to write a 
significant amount of perl code to make things happen, which is what TT 
is designed to prevent.  TT's logic, macros and functions allow you to 
easily separate the presentation of your site from the business logic, 
which is why it's the view of choice for many.

Okies? :)




Steve H wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> (preamble) I've been working for a couple of months now on the strategy, 
> constraints and designs for using Catalyst for a portal CRM app.  I 
> chose to use Seamstress rather than TT, as it seems a more contemporary 
> approach - at least the notion of workig with the HTML tree compared to 
> using another mini language (anyway, perhaps if the related doco was 
> more extensive, example-wise, then I'm sure Seamstress would get a 
> larger following).
> Anyway.... the dilema I have is: With Catalyst, how do I compose a html 
> document from multiple sources. For example I have many Boxes of data, 
> the creation of which I'd like to generalise, and optionally include 
> some/none/all in any finally composed page/document (and positioned at 
> for examle, tags in any doc they could appear in)... like a menu or a 
> hot-list or other things that may be common to many documents/pages.
> At face value, Catalysts model of a Controller to crunch/prepare the 
> data then a View to render a doc/page, seems to promote a 1-document per 
> view notion.
> For this sort of er, Portal app I'm working on, I'd like to when 
> composing a page, identify whether or not particular common elements 
> (say, boxes of data) should be included, and then merely call out to 
> some common functoin to build the things which I then stitch them in at 
> the appropriate place in the final doc.
> Seems to me that at the point in processing I need to intervene (the 
> final page's View), the doc is the compiled/hash representing the html 
> doc tree.  I can certainly look_down() and replace_content() in that 
> tree.... how though can I call some other function that will return the 
> appropriate structure to stitch in.  If they were their own View, they 
> would parse a doc fragment (or even a larger doc with lots of common 
> fragments) into a tree in it's new()... then I'd call in to some 
> function that would build and return me the structure that I could 
> push/replace/splice in to the tree I'm composing.
> Although I'm a well experienced programmer from way back :(from the old 
> top-down days though), I am still struggling to get my head around the 
> whole interitence and calling model of the Catalyst OO framework... in 
> who does what to who, when, for how much, and where did they meet.
> Hopefully what I'm trying to do  is pretty 101 stuff, and someone with 
> the right Catalyst/Seamstress stuff can 'show me the way'... as I'm 
> going nuts trying out different things from Google'ing.
> 
> regards
> Steve
> 
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