Well, I'm torn on this. I totally agree this sounds very sensible. Do the crunching in the Perl script.

But at the same time, this use of TT just seems custom made for my application, with th epossible exception of this last outrageous desire. I mean, imagine, you've got data that looks like

year x 5
- class x 3
--- sub-class x 5
----- data rows x 50

This just screams for 

$data{$year}{$class}{$sub-class}{row-element-i} = 'foo';

[download]
and then 
<table>
[% FOREACH year IN data.keys.sort %]
   <tr><td colspan=x>Year [% year %]</td></tr>
   [% FOREACH class IN data.$year.keys.sort %]
      <tr><td>spacer</td><td colspan=x-1>Class [% class %]</td></tr>
      [% FOREACH sub-class IN data.$year.$class.keys.sort %]
         <tr><td colspan=2>spacer</td><td colspan=x-2>Sub-Class [% sub
+-class %]</td></tr>
         <tr>
         [% FOREACH element IN data.$year.$class.$sub-class.keys.sort 
+%]
            <td>[% data.$year.$class.$sub-class.$element %]</td>
         [%END%]
         </tr>
      [%END%]
   [%END%]
[%END%]
</table>

[download]
and, bing!, you're done, with the data generation completely dissociated from the layout generation.

This is the kind of power that made me fall in love with TT.

My alternative - or at least the only one of which I'm aware, would be to do all that html generation inside the Perl script and export $data_table_html_string to the template.

In reply to Re^2: Reverse sort order in FOREACH in Template Toolkit by punch_card_don
in thread Reverse sort order in FOREACH in Template Toolkit by punch_card_don

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