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in reply to Re: rant on = qw(HTML::Mason Embperl Template etc) ;
in thread rant on = qw(HTML::Mason Embperl Template etc) ;

One thing I didn't like about HTML::Template (maybe I just didn't understand it enough to come up with a clean solution) was the following.

I wanted to give the HTML developers a set of variables that they could use. They could pick and choose which of the set they wanted to display. It was a snippet of HTML to display the current weather, so they could show "wind speed", "wind direction", "temperature", "humidity", and so on.... I did something like:

$tmpl = HTML::Template->new('filename' => $TEMPLATE); $tmpl->param('Temperature' => $current->{'Temperature'}); $tmpl->param('WindDirection' => current->{'WindDirection'}); $tmpl->param('WindSpeed' => $current->{'WindSpeed'}); ... print $tmpl->output();

and the HTML developers would ideally be able to select from those variables and use them like this:

<TABLE> <TR> <TD> <SPAN CLASS="weather-temp"> <!--TMPL_VAR NAME="Temperature"-->&deg;F </SPAN> </TD> </TR> </TABLE>

But actually what I had to do was put ALL the variables into the template, and hide them as a comment, otherwise I would get some error:

<H3>Current weather</H3> [insert HTML here using a selection of the variables below] <!--DO NOT REMOVE:<!--TMPL_VAR NAME="Temperature"--><!--TMPL_VAR NAME= +"PerceivedTemperature"--><!--TMPL_VAR NAME="R elativeHumidity"--><!--TMPL_VAR NAME="WindDirection"--><!--TMPL_VAR NA +ME="WindSpeed"--><!--TMPL_VAR NAME="Pressure" --><!--TMPL_VAR NAME="Visibility"--><!--TMPL_VAR NAME="Icon"--><!--TMP +L_VAR NAME="IconDescription"-->--> ...

and I just find that extremely ugly. What's more, if your variables are within a TMPL_LOOP (which I also did a list of news headlines, so in fact I found myself in that situation), then you have to put that blob of commented-out TMPL_VARs inside that loop.

Also I found that somehow this setup was confusing to the HTML designers, so I ended up having to edit the HTML anyway (maybe that's unique to my situation, though), thus smashing my dreams of never having to look at the HTML again.

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Re: Re: Re: rant on = qw(HTML::Mason Embperl Template etc) ;
by maverick (Curate) on Nov 10, 2001 at 06:05 UTC
    There is an option to allow exactly what you're looking for. In fact it's one I ALWAYS have set. From the docs:

    die_on_bad_params - if set to 0 the module will let you call $template->param(param_name => 'value') even if 'param_name' doesn't exist in the template body. Defaults to 1.

    Change your constructor to

    $tmpl = HTML::Template->new('filename' => $TEMPLATE, 'die_on_bad_params' => 0 );
    And you'll be good to go.

    /\/\averick
    perl -l -e "eval pack('h*','072796e6470272f2c5f2c5166756279636b672');"

      Excellent, thanks.