Here's another example. To accomodate multiple foreign languages I store my loaded templates in a hash keyed by language code. The loaded template is mostly the same template files with param information filled in specific to the language. My procedure is this: I always check if the template exists in the hash for each display of the page (using the visitor's language preference). If not, I go through my load process which involves "tmpl_load" and a series of Locale::Maketext calls to translate English into whatever language the template needs to be in. Generally, this means using the param method to set the xml:lang, the encoding, the stylesheet (to get the font for non-Roman languages), and a slew of Maketext calls to translate fill in form captions, heading values, etc.
Not all the page text dynamically translated like this. Some larger paragraph text may exist in files included into the template from a directory structure representing the language (like /templates/en-US). This gets back to the earlier example of how it's difficult to dynamically select includes. (In this case HTML_TEMPLATE_ROOT would work *if* all my templates (non-language specific) existed in that directory too.) Anyway, this language processing only needs to be done *at the time the template is loaded*. I don't need to do it for each output of the template. I'm keeping my own template objects for each language (in the hash). There are only a few output-time params that need to be re-evaluated at output time (status message, select lists because the selection may have changed, form fields). All the translated text performed when the template was first tmpl-loaded doesn't need to be re-evaluated. This case is a little different than the previous example. In the previous example, I needed substitution to occur at compile time. In this case, I need to specify that the evaluation of the param is *permanent*. If compile-time substitution were available I could setup all my name=value pairs prior to the tmpl-load. But, in my mind I'd rather do the tmpl-load (specifying anything that needs to be done at compile time, like the conditional include mentioned previously) and then have a method to perform one-time, permanent substitution to the loaded template. This way I could issue my numerous Maketext calls after the template is loaded and let the results be stored in the template rather than creating my own temporary holder just to so the values are available at compile time (assuming there could be a feature to perform compile-time evaluation). Does that make sense? Am I completely missing something? Thanks, Mark ------------------------------------------------------- The SF.Net email is sponsored by: Beat the post-holiday blues Get a FREE limited edition SourceForge.net t-shirt from ThinkGeek. It's fun and FREE -- well, almost....http://www.thinkgeek.com/sfshirt _______________________________________________ Html-template-users mailing list Html-template-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/html-template-users
