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

[P T Withington]

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!