Re: [Templates] Calling BLOCKS inside templates

> But once loaded, it's cached in memory.

Randal,

> But once loaded, it's cached in memory.

Sure.  I'm not worried about the speed issue.

> [% PROCESS my_template.tt2 | null %]
> 
> would even ensure that the non-block output didn't interfere.

That's not _exactly_ what I need, but I wonder if I could leverage that 
somehow ...

> Buddy> But I need to do this from the code,
> 
> as in $tt->process('bar') ?

Right.  Only, it's actually $tt->process('my_template.tt2/bar') (which of 
course only works when EXPOSE_BLOCKS is true).  But I think I've failed to 
explain my problem sufficiently.  At the risk of being long-winded, let me try 
again.

Let's say I have a web page.  My web page is named "fred".  The "fred" page is 
divided into 4 squares: let's call them foo, bar, baz, and ... whatever comes 
after baz. <g>  All 4 of these squares relate to the same thing (i.e. 
fredness).  But they capture individual aspects of fredness that can be 
operated on by the web sufer separately.  Now, I use OpenThought (which is 
basically just carefully controlled Javascript) to allow me to change each 
square individually (e.g. in response to some user input) without having to 
refresh the whole page.  That's what I'm shooting for.

The implementation of this, so far, is a template called fred.tt2, which 
contains BLOCKs named foo, bar, baz and whatever-that-last-one-is.  Of course, 
fred.tt2 contains some other stuff too: at the very least the containing table 
which holds the separate squares.  When I want to load the page the first 
time, I process fred.tt2.  When I want to refresh only foo based on some user 
input, I process fred.tt2/foo.  All is well with the world.

But let's further say that there's some common thing that _all_ the squares 
have to do, perhaps display errors in a common format.  So I make a new BLOCK 
called display_error.  Now, if I need to display an error when I first load 
the page (i.e. while processing fred.tt2), that's all fine and well.  But if I 
need to display the error when refreshing the foo square (i.e. while 
processing fred.tt2/foo), I have a problem.  If the display_error BLOCK isn't 
inside the foo BLOCK, I can't call it.  If the display_error BLOCK _is_ inside 
the foo BLOCK, I've solved it for foo, but I have the same problem for bar et 
al.  I could give display_error its own template--say, display_error.tt2--but 
this is a slippery slope which leads to lots of lots of little templates and 
my HTML designer complaining that she can never find anything.  I could always 
use [% PROCESS fred.tt2/display_error %] inside BLOCK foo and its pals, but 
then I've encoded the name of the template into the code and every time I 
rename a file, or move it into a different directory, I've got to hunt down a 
million places to change (so far, this solution is probably the best of a bad 
lot, unless anybody else has a better suggestion).

Hopefully that makes more sense.

		-- Buddy

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