Flow/Velocity

[Christopher Oliver]

I've just committed changes to support calling Velocity 
(http://jakarta.apache.org/velocity) from the Cocoon flow layer.

In order to not break any existing users of the VelocityGenerator, I've 
created a new generator:

  org.apache.cocoon.generation.FlowVelocityGenerator

This generator differs from the existing VelocityGenerator in the way it 
populates the context passed to the Velocity template. It provides two 
properties:

1) this - the bean object passed to sendPage*() in your script
2) continuation - the current continuation (an instance of 
org.apache.cocoon.components.flow.WebContinuation)

In addition, the immediate properties of the bean object are also 
available in the context. So if your bean has a property "foo", you can 
access it in your template as $foo or as $this.foo.

This means you can now write a flow script like this:

  function test() {
      sendPage("templates/flow-hello-page.vm",
               {
                   name: "Cocoon",
                   project: "Velocity",
                   when: new java.util.Date()
               });
  }
that calls a Velocity template like this:

  <?xml version="1.0"?>
  <page>
   <title>Hello</title>
   <content>
    <para>This is my first Cocoon2 page!</para>
    <para>Hi!  This page is generated using $this.name from the 
$this.project project.</para>
    <para>Hi!  I can also access name, project, and when like this: 
This page is generated using $name from the $project project at 
$when.toString() .</para>
   </content>
  </page>

When the build for samples is fixed, I'll add a sample of using Velocity 
with flow scripts, but you should be able to try it yourself, so please 
do and let me know of any problems.

Regards,

Chris