[Laszlo-user] Your vote needed: Text formattingand datapaths

[P T Withington]

The formatting string is the same as [C's `printf`](http://www.rt.com/ 
man/printf.3.html).  The example shows that if you are just trying to  
concatenate separate queries into a line, using `format` is simpler.   
Other examples in this thread show the use of more commplex format  
strings to present data in a more human-readable format.  E.g.,

format("You have %d items in your cart, for a total of $%6.2d",  
cart.itemCount, cart.total);

On 2007-07-13, at 11:50 EDT, Peter Brand wrote:

> Hi all
>
> Before beeing able to vote I should understand: How do formatting  
> according
> to #1 (using attribute 'layout') and formatting acordung to #2 (using
> method 'format' and string-argument '%s %s') compare? While #1  
> obviously is
> simple layout along y-axis, I cannot see in what kind of  
> 'formatting' is
> specified by the string '%s %s'. What, precisely, is that string  
> about to
> do, what's its meaning? Apologies, if that' a silly question.
>
> Peter
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: laszlo-user-bounces at openlaszlo.org
> [mailto:laszlo-user-bounces at openlaszlo.org] On Behalf Of David Temkin
> Sent: Friday, July 13, 2007 4:44 PM
> To: P T Withington
> Cc: laszlo-user at openlaszlo.org Users; OpenLaszlo development and bug
> reporting
> Subject: Re: [Laszlo-user] [Laszlo-dev] Your vote needed: Text
> formattingand datapaths
>
> #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()'))"
>>     />
>>
>