[Laszlo-dev] Your vote needed: Text formatting and datapaths

[David Temkin]

#2 is good. Keeps things (moderately) straightforward and reduces the  
amount of complexity for users and for implementors.

On Jul 11, 2007, at 11:43 AM, P T Withington wrote:

> We recently added a `format` method to the text tag that allows you  
> to format the content of a text tag using the standard printf-style  
> controls.  We think this will be most useful when data binding a  
> text node.  As an example, if you have an XML dataset of people  
> with firstName and lastName nodes, you currently would display each  
> element by saying:
>
> 1.  <view datapath="person/" layout="axis: x">
>       <text text="$path{'firstName/text()'}" />
>       <text text="$path{'lastName/text()'}" />
>     </view>
>
> With the addition of the format method, you can now say this more  
> compactly, using only 1 node, instead of 3 (which is also more  
> efficient):
>
> 2.  <text datapath="person/"
>       ondata="format('%s %s', datapath.xpathQuery('firstName/text 
> ()'), datapath.xpathQuery('lastName/text()'))"
>     />
>
> When the data gets bound to the text node, you fill in the text by  
> calling format and making the two xpath queries as arguments to the  
> format method.
>
> But we are considering two other possible syntaxes:
>
> 3.  <text datapath="person/"
>       dataformat="'%s %s'"
>       data=$path{'firstName/text()', 'lastName/text()'}
>     />
>
> Here you specify a format control string for the data associated  
> with the text node, and we allow you to make multiple queries in  
> your $path constraint.
>
> 4.  <text datapath="person/" dataformat="'%{firstName/text()}1$q % 
> {lastName/text()}1$q'" />
>
> Here the queries are embedded in the control string with a custom  
> extension.
>
> Please cast your vote!
>