RE: [Templates] Is this a job for TT?

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I happen to have lots of identical situations (Excel input; TT-templated
pages out)

I'll let others with more TT expertise tell you how to do it entirely in TT,
but I think you would require some perl anyway, either in a driver or in the
templates themselves.

One thing I'd do is get rid of the copy/paste step. I use
SpreadSheet::ParseExcel to directly extract information from the
spreadsheets. This is much more convenient and powerful--it supports a lot
more than copy/paste can (multiple worksheets, cell formatting, document
settings, etc). I have a web application where people upload their Excel
file and it instantly produces multiple HTML files.

At the parse stage you can fill out a data structure like this:
  @groups = (
    {
      id        => 1,
      name      => 'Group 1',
      html      => 'group1.html',
      broadcast => 'group1@x.xxx',
      members   => [ 'me@x.xxx', 'you@x.xxx' ],
    },
    ...
  );

Then you just do something like
  $tt->process($_->{html}, $_) for @groups;
and the templates would be trivial.

This is a simplified version of how I do it. The web application I was
talking about actually takes input in several formats, normalizes them to a
perl data structure, and matches them with templates created by
non-programmers (which are added/viewed/edited through this app).

Perhaps this will help you.

- Mark.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: templates-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.xxx 
> [mailto:templates-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.xxx] On Behalf Of Ron Pero
> Sent: Friday, February 18, 2005 2:33 AM
> To: templates@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.xxx
> Subject: [Templates] Is this a job for TT?
> 
> 
> There's a task I currently do with perl, but would like to 
> see if TT can do the job more easily.
> 
> Although I've used TT just a little bit, I am very familiar 
> with templating in general, and have the Badger book, so I'm 
> just looking for a pointer on how to get started with this, 
> and whether TT can even do it.
> 
> Here's the mission.
> 
> Start with a text file, which is copied and pasted from an 
> Excel spreadsheet, so it is tab delimited. In this case each 
> line contains a name and email and other info, and a couple 
> headings, and lines of hyphens. The perl script reads the 
> file line by line and creates html pages from it.
> 
> The Datafile plugin would seem like a good candidate, but 
> here's the catch: the text file contains several lists within 
> the single file, each of which gets made into its own html 
> page. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Datafile has no 
> mechanism to read several different lists within the same 
> file, stopping at the end of each list, letting TT do 
> something, then starting the next list.
> 
> Here's a simplified version of the text file.
> 
> GROUP 1
> 
> Broadcast E-Mail Address: group1@x.xxx
> 
> me	me@x.xxx
> you	you@x.xxx
> he	he@x.xxx
> 
> -------------------------------------
> 
> GROUP 2
> 
> Broadcast E-Mail Address: group2@x.xxx
> 
> he	he@x.xxx
> she	she@x.xxx
> it	it@x.xxx
> 
> -------------------------------------
> 
> GROUP WHATEVER
> 
> Broadcast E-Mail Address: group3@x.xxx
> 
> we	we@x.xxx
> you	you@x.xxx
> they	they@x.xxx
> 
> So, each of these lists becomes an html page, with 
> href="mailto:me@x.xxx"; and so forth. The perl script "knows" 
> to end the list and start the new one based on the hyphens 
> and the formatting of the headings.
> 
> Is this a job for TT? If so, what is the trick?
> 
> It pretty much needs to be a simple text file like this. 
> People in the office edit the data now and then in Excel, 
> then turn it over to me to convert into nice looking html pages.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Ron
> 
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