Re: [SMARTY-DEV] Var Templates

On Tue, 15 Apr 2003, boots wrote: > Hi all. > > FWIW, I've been casually following the long discussion on backticks and > automatically expanding vars as if they were themselves templates. I > think it was Tom Sommer who initiated that discussion, but if not, he > certainly has put a lot of interesting details on the table. > > One thing I am uncertain of is the need for such a thing in the base > Smarty engine. From Monte Ohrt's comments, it looks like this type of > change has potential to wreak havoc with performance and in the end, > I'm not sure why anyone would REALLY need this feature--at least in the > engine core. There are two issues I'm concerned about: > > 1) there seems to be a push to program general COMPUTATION using the > template facility instead of PHP code. I'm -1 on that because I think > that as much as possible, logic should be handled in the PHP code. > Otherwise your templates aren't really templates, are they? In other > words, if you want to evaluate a var using templates and then use that > value in another template, you should probably do the first evaluation > in PHP and pass the results to the second template. Both your code and > your templates are likely to be a bit more stable in that case. > > 2) I want the base Smarty to stay as minimally small (and fast!) as > possible. IMHO, anything that can be implemented effeciently using the > Smarty API (ie. plugins, resources, filters) should be factored out of > the engine. > > For example, the functionality that Tom is talking about can likely be > created using a custom Resource. I posted a very simple Global Var > template reader to the Wiki back in september that shows how to go > about doing a similar thing (it would have to be expanded to meet Tom's > criteria). The point is, is that there is a LOT of room to extend > functionality without trying to shoehorn everything into the core. This > is especially true for the more abstract and escoteric features that we > developers sometimes crave :). Amen. That has been my view for a long time too. -Andrei http://www.gravitonic.com/ What's hard, in hacking as in fiction, is not the writing, it's deciding what to write. -- Neal Stephenson