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

[James Robey]

My logic was that putting "%s %s" is a valid string, and there  
shouldn't be any gotchas there - putting a "%s" into a String()  
doesn't do anything by itself. That the format attribute invokes  
processing on a normal string is natural to me and if you forget, you  
get "%s" on your screen to remind you :)

As to the name of the function colliding, id' rather see the (lesser  
used, i presume, is the opinion?) format() function named to  
'applyFormat' to mimic applying a delegate, and allowing both to be  
easily remembered.

Any better? Think this is my best here, otherwise overall i still  
like #2 the best , strange though that sound.

in tag land

<text datapath="person/" text="%s %s" format="$path{'firstName/text 
()', 'lastName/text()'}" />

and in javascript:

<text datapath="person/"
       ondata="applyFormat('%s %s', datapath.xpathQuery('firstName/ 
text()'), datapath.xpathQuery('lastName/text()'))"
     />

(which blows away the current contents of the text attribute by  
nature, of course)

-j


On Jul 11, 2007, at 3:59 PM, P T Withington wrote:

> On 2007-07-11, at 15:49 EDT, Henry Minsky wrote:
>
>> On 7/11/07, James Robey <jrobey at laszlosystems.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Wow, a major reduction in code size and removes lexically  
>>> spurious layouts
>>> too!
>>>
>>>
>>> *If i were king*:
>>> <text datapath="person/" text="%s %s" format="$path{'firstName/ 
>>> text()',
>>> 'lastName/text()'}" />
>>>
>>
>> I vote for that one!
>
> Problems:
>
> 1) `text` is the actual content of the text node.  You don't want  
> the compiler to magically guess that if there are %'s in the  
> content that it should do something different.
>
> 2) `format` is a method on text nodes.  We cause infinite pain when  
> we try to have an attribute and a method with the same name.
>
> This suggestion is really choice 3 (which uses new attribute names  
> to avoid the problems above):
>
>   <text datapath="person/" dataformat="'%s %s'" data=$path 
> {'firstName/text()', 'lastName/text()'} />
>
> (I showed `dataformat` as being an expression, so you could have a  
> variable format if you liked.)
>
> So, should I infer you and James really like choice 3?
>
>

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