#======================================================================== # # Changes # # DESCRIPTION # Revision history for the Template Toolkit version 2.07, detailing # significant changes between versions, most recent first. Some # way down the file you'll find a section detailing major changes from # version 1.* to 2.* and a list of "Gotchas!" that you might have to # look out for when upgrading between major versions. # # AUTHOR # Andy Wardley <abw@kfs.org> # # NOTE # This file is built from a source template distributed as part of # the docsrc bundle (docsrc/src/Release/Changes) which is available # from http://www.template-toolkit.org/download.html#docsrc. # Any changes you make here may be lost! # #------------------------------------------------------------------------ # $Id: Changes.tt2,v 1.50 2002/04/17 14:01:24 abw Exp $ #======================================================================== #------------------------------------------------------------------------ # Version 2.07 - April 17th 2002 #------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Changed example in synopsis of Template::Plugin::XML::Style to one based on that posted to the mailing list by Tony Bowden. * Fixed a single/double quoting bug in docsrc which prevented [% and %] being correctly displayed in the tables of contents in HTML docs. #------------------------------------------------------------------------ # Version 2.06g - April 15th 2002 ## DEVELOPER RELEASE ## #------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Fixed a bug in ttree which prevented it from passing the recurse option onto the Template object due to a name mismatch: recurse/recursion * Changed Template::Test to accept messages to ok(). Also added is() as an alias for match(). * Fixed an oversight/bug in the XS stash where a missing aTHX_ around line 546 caused compilation to fail under Win32. * Applied a patch to Template::Provider from Alexander Schilling which untaints paths before calling mkpath() to prevent errors under -T. * Fixed Template::Parser so that the INTERPOLATE option now works with files > 32K, thanks to the efforts of Stephen Adkins. #------------------------------------------------------------------------ # Version 2.06f - March 13th 2002 ## DEVELOPER RELEASE ## #------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Fixed a bug in both the Perl and XS Stash modules which resulted in virtual methods being called on the base stash, e.g. [% size %] was treated as [% stash.size %]. The only exception that we allow through is 'import' so that we can [% import(another_hash) %] * Fixed the compilation of the XS Stash on earlier versions of Perl (e.g. 5.00503) and other platforms (e.g. Win32) by including the ppport.h file. * Fixed a warning about undefined values in Template::Plugin::Format raised by t/format.t * Fixed a warning in t/html.t raised when neither Apache::Util nor HTML::Entities is installed. #------------------------------------------------------------------------ # Version 2.06e - March 12th 2002 ## DEVELOPER RELEASE ## #------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Fixed a minor bug in t/tiedhash.t which was trying to use the XS stash even if it wasn't enabled. Thanks to Lyle Brooks for the patch. * Added the 'match' virtual method for matching a string against a regex and returning a reference to a list of (captured) (backrefs). * Changed html filter back into a fast and simple static filter. Added html_entity filter which uses Apache::Util or HTML::Entities to do a complete and thorough (but slower) job. The undocumented 'entity' option of the html filter is now removed (but may appear elsewhere). * Added the size virtual method for scalars to prove a consistent way of testing something.size to see if it has some value(s). For scalars it returns 1. * Modified the 'sort' and 'nsort' list virtual methods to allow a sort key passed to represent a method to be called on objects in the list as well as the key of a value to be fetched from hash references in the list. e.g. [% books.sort('author') %] allows 'books' to contain a list of hash refs with an 'author' key or objects with an 'author' method. Thanks to Tony Bowden for suggesting this improvement. * Applied a patch from Simon Wilcox to strip MS-DOS \r characters from end of lines read by the Datafile plugin. * Applied a patch from Ville Skyttä which fixes numerous minor bugs in various splash templates. * Added the 'defined' and 'exists' virtual hash methods for testing if a value has a defined value, or exists in the hash, respectively. * Applied a patch from Stathy Touloumis to make the XS Stash thread safe. * Added the 'grep' virtual list method. * Applied a patch from Mark Fowler to improve the XML XPath plugin's handling of nested elements. * Fixed handling of prefix support in template() and insert() methods of Template::Content. Any prefix is stripped from the name but passed as the second argument to the provider fetch() method. e.g. [% INCLUDE foo:bar %] calls the foo $provider->fetch('bar', 'foo') and [% INCLUDE http://tt2.org/t/templates/hello %] results in a call to $provider->fetch('//tt2.org/t/templates/hello', 'http') #------------------------------------------------------------------------ # Version 2.06d - 22nd January 2002 ## DEVELOPER RELEASE ## #------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Applied a patch to the DBI plugin from Simon Matthews to stop it from closing a DBH which was passed in open from an external source. * Applied another patch from Simon to fix a bug with compiled templates which were never being loaded due to a '<' comparison of timestamps rather than '<='. See http://tt2.org/pipermail/templates/2002-January/002361.html * Applied a patch from Doug Steinwand which fixes a minor bug in the XS Stash as reported by Andrey Brindeew: http://tt2.org/pipermail/templates/2002-January/002475.html * Changed URL plugin to accept multiple values for CGI parameters, e.g. [% USE URL('/cgi-bin/foo', items=[10,20]) %] generates a URL like: /cgi-bin/foo?item=10&item=20 * Applied a patch from David D. Kilzer to Makefile.PL to add -I flags to the various invocations of perl that we missed, and also to add a clean/FILES target for WriteMakefile(). See. http://tt2.org/pipermail/templates/2002-January/002431.html * Fixed Makefile.PL to warn, not die, about mandatory modules, leaving it to the definitions in the PREREQ_PM which the CPAN module can understand. Thanks to Leon for waving the flag. * Applied Leon's doc patch to the Table plugin to demonstrate row/column transposition. * Added ucfirst and lcfirst filters to fold first character to upper or lower case respectively. Thanks to Paul Makepeace for the patch. * Fixed truncate method of String plugin to not append suffix if the string is already shorter than the required length. Thanks to Yann Kerhervé for the patch. #------------------------------------------------------------------------ # Version 2.06c - 20th December 2001 ## DEVELOPER RELEASE ## #------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Changed both Perl and XS Stash modules to try to apply a SCALAR_OPS virtual method to a blessed object as a last-ditch chance if all else fails. Thanks to Tony Bowden for reporting the problem. See http://tt2.org/pipermail/templates/2001-December/002263.html * Added tie() method to DBI plugin which interfaces to the Tie::DBI module, based on some plugin code sent to me courtesy of Dave Hodgkinson. Also made various minor cleanups to DBI code and updated documentation and tests. Incidentally, this tickled the missing feature in the XS stash which doesn't yet support tied hashes. * Applied a patch from Christian Schaffner which fixes a problem in the Makefile.PL for installation via the fink package manager under Mac OS X. * Fixed up some of the ugliness in the docsrc tools. #------------------------------------------------------------------------ # Version 2.06b - 2nd December 2001 ## DEVELOPER RELEASE ## #------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Added the Template::Plugin::Filter module to make plugin filters easier to write and rewrote the Template::Plugin::XML::Style to use it. * Added the Template::Plugin::String module which provides a nice object oriented approach to string manipulation. * Added the '_' string concatenation operator. [% foo = bar _ baz %] * Applied Craig's suggested fixes to the parser to correct potential precendence problems and added tests to the test suite. See: http://tt2.org/pipermail/templates/2001-November/002138.html * Applied Leon's patch to Template::Service to delete the 'template' entry added to the variable hash at the end of processing. * Fixed an obscured bug/oversight in Template::Plugins which tested generated plugin objects for truth rather than definedness to see if the plugin returned was valid. This can cause problems if your object has an overloaded stringification operator which gets called (but shouldn't) and could return an untrue (but correct) value. * Fixed t/dumper.t to only have one entry in each hash to avoid hash ordering problems. Thanks to Randal for reporting the problem. * Added the assert() subroutine to Template::Test. * Added some more content to the FAQ. #------------------------------------------------------------------------ # Version 2.06a - 19th November 2001 ## DEVELOPER RELEASE ## #------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Added the XML::Style plugin for doing simple XML stylesheet like transformations and t/xmlstyle.t. * Fixed a bug in the DBI plugin where nested loops could cause the inner query to overwrite the _STH of the outer query causing the outer loop to end prematurely. Thanks to Dave Hodgkinson, Craig Barratt and Simon Matthews for working on the problem and solution. For more info, see http://tt2.org/pipermail/templates/2001-November/002067.html * Applied a patch from Aleksey Nogin to Makefile.PL to call bin/gifsplash with the '-i' option. This fixes the problem reported by Kenny Flegal: http://www.tt2.org/pipermail/templates/2001-November/002028.html * Applied a patch from Stas Bekman to add 'align' to template/html/row. #------------------------------------------------------------------------ # Version 2.06 - 7th Nov 2001 #------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Fixed a bug in t/compile5.t which caused the following test warning on Win32: "Cannot chdir to D/blah/blah/Template-Toolkit-2.05c/t/test: No such file or directory at t\compile5.t line 73". Thanks to Chris Winters for finding the bug and testing the fix. #------------------------------------------------------------------------ # Version 2.05d - 6th Nov 2001 ## DEVELOPER RELEASE ## #------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Fixed a bug in the parser which was missing a '^' anchor on the regex matching the TAGS directive, causing it to match anywhere. Thanks to Dominic Mitchell and Adrian Howard for reporting and fixing the problem. See http://tt2.org/pipermail/templates/2001-October/001760.html * Modified Template::Parser to correctly handle "\t" and "\r" in double quoted strings as well as "\n". Added test to t/parser.t * Applied a patch from Stas Bekman to add 'valign' as an option to the html/cell template. * Applied a patch from Harald Joerg to document the 3rd $default option to Template::Stash::set(). * Fixed a problem in the docsrc build whereby double quote strings were causing embedded variables to be incorrectly interpolated, e.g. [% INCLUDE xyz title="set($var, $val, $default)" %] is now [% INCLUDE xyz title='set($var, $val, $default)' %]. Thanks to Harald Joerg for reporting the problem. #------------------------------------------------------------------------ # Version 2.05c - 22 Oct 2001 ## DEVELOPER RELEASE ## #------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Applied a patch from Tony Payne which fixes a bug where templates were being mangled under mod_perl due to a missing O_TRUNC on a sysopen(). See http://www.tt2.org/pipermail/templates/2001-October/001834.html * Fixed the mess I made of Pudge's XS Stash patch applied in 2.05b. * Updated the INSTALL/README guides to note the PPM installation for Win32 users. #------------------------------------------------------------------------ # Version 2.05b - 21 Sep 2001 ## DEVELOPER RELEASE ## #------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Applied a patch from Chris Nandor to bring the XS stash in line with the regular Perl stash wrt accepting defined but empty keys. See http://www.tt2.org/pipermail/templates/2001-September/001695.html * Applied a patch to Template::Provider from Craig Barratt to fix a bug when caching is turned off (CACHE_SIZE = 0). See http://www.tt2.org/pipermail/templates/2001-September/001682.html * Moved installation out of README into a separate INSTALL file and added the HACKING document as a pointer to the internals docs. * Added the 'uri' filter for URI escaping text. #------------------------------------------------------------------------ # Version 2.05a - 12 Sep 2001 ## DEVELOPER RELEASE ## #------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Applied a patch from Chris Nandor to use 'MSWin32' as a specific O/S detection rather than /win/i which gives a false positive for 'Darwin'. Needless to say, that's something of an insult to Darwin :-). Also fixes Template::Provider to use File::Spec::file_name_is_absolute() to test for absolute paths instead of the previous kludge. * Updated Template::Manual::Internals to include information about how to prepare patches and other useful information for potential TT hackers. * Added some code to the XS Stash to handle trivial access to tied hashes. Regular set/get/default should work as expected, but at present intermediate hashes are not auto-vivified on assignment, e.g. [% these.dont.get.created.in.XS.but.do.in.the.perl.stash = 10 %] #------------------------------------------------------------------------ # Version 2.05 - 11 Sep 2001 #------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Bumped version number and updated documentation for release. #------------------------------------------------------------------------ # Version 2.04f - 10 Sep 2001 ## DEVELOPER RELEASE ## #------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Fixed a bug in the Date plugin which was performing one localtime() too many when a date was passed in to the format() method. e.g. the result from date.format('12:59::00 30/09/2001', '%H:%M') was 13:59 not 12:59. Thanks to Thierry-Michel Barral and Matthew Tuck for reporting the problem. * Incorporated Doug's new version of the XS Stash. It fixes the problem with strings not being recognized as integers (and the item = item + 1 problem). It also adds a few additional tests for this situation to t/stash-xs.t * Fixed a minor bug in Makefile.PL which looked for 'msql' or 'mysql' as the default DBD for testing DBI but didn't select a suitable default if the above drivers weren't available. #------------------------------------------------------------------------ # Version 2.04e - 06 Sep 2001 ## DEVELOPER RELEASE ## #------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Fixed bug in 'list' entry in $HASH_OPS in both Template/Stash.pm and Template/Stash/Context.pm to return '%$hash' instead of 'values %$hash'. Thanks to Craig Barrett for reporting the problem. * Applied a patch from Craig to Stash.pm and Stash/Context.pm to accept negative integers as array indices, counting back from the end of the list as in Perl. This brings it into line with the new XS Stash. http://www.tt2.org/pipermail/templates/2001-August/001493.html * And another patch from Craig to allow $var and ${var} to be used as keys in hashes. http://www.tt2.org/pipermail/templates/2001-August/001410.html * Modified Template::Plugins fetch() method to accept $factory as a code reference. Then changed _load() to return a closure for regular Perl modules loaded (via LOAD_PERL option) which, which called by fetch(), removes the first argument, the $context reference, which the non-plugin module won't be expecting. This fixes the problem reported (and also fixed but in a slightly different way) by Lyle Brooks, here in these messages: http://www.tt2.org/pipermail/templates/2001-August/001397.html http://www.tt2.org/pipermail/templates/2001-August/001406.html * Removed the eq, ne, gt, lt, ge and ne operators added in 2.04d. Given that they can (and did) break code that had existing variables with those names, I decided it was best to strip them out again and think more carefully about adding them to an official release. Hence they're not going to be in 2.05. * Fixed an outrageous oversight in the HTML 'rgb' template by defining 'orange' as a valid colour (I can't believe Leon hasn't already sent me a patch for this!) Created a new custom colour scheme in the Makefile.PL which uses it. Hacked the Makefile.PL and the generated ttree config file to allow text colours to be specified as well as button background colours. #------------------------------------------------------------------------ # Version 2.04d - 29 Aug 2001 ## DEVELOPER RELEASE ## #------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Incorporated Doug Steinwand's XS Stash. This adds the files in the 'xs' directory, t/stash-xs.t, bin/tt-bench.pl and includes some work on the Makefile.PL to incorporate the required prompting, etc. * Added gt, ge, lt and le as comparison operators which map directly to their Perl counterparts. Added tests to t/stash.t and relevant documentation to the IF directive. * Applied some patches from Leon and Doug to enhance the coverage of the test suite. * Added 'sorted' as a flag to the HTML plugin to return attributes in sorted order. Mainly for debugging purposes, as used in t/html.t. * Fixed Template::Parser.pm to recognise "\r" as a valid escape sequence in double quoted strings. #------------------------------------------------------------------------ # Version 2.04c - 04 Aug 2001 ## DEVELOPER RELEASE ## #------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Fixed t/dbi.t and t/latex*.t to not complain about "Test header seen twice". Thanks to Leon. #------------------------------------------------------------------------ # Version 2.04b - 04 Aug 2001 ## DEVELOPER RELEASE ## #------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Fixed a bug in the Makefile.PL which prevented the correct targets from being added to the generated Makefile to install additional components, build HTML docs, etc. * Applied a patch from Chris Nandor to fix a bug introduced by the taint checks in 2.04 which barfed on ';' in filenames. Also changes open() to sysopen() in Template::Document for additional security. See http://www.tt2.org/pipermail/templates/2001-August/001348.html * Another part of the same pudge patch adds FACTORY as a default value to Template::Parser to allow Template::Directive factory class to be replaced. #------------------------------------------------------------------------ # Version 2.04a - 5th July 2001 ## DEVELOPER RELEASE ## #------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Changed GD plugin and tests to require GD version 1.20. See http://www.tt2.org/pipermail/templates/2001-July/001212.html * Applied Craig's fix for the DBI plugin to correctly destroy a statement handle to ensure that finish() gets called on it even if the iterator doesn't complete. See: http://www.tt2.org/pipermail/templates/2001-July/001216.html * Further to Craig's points in the above post, I added get_all() and get() to the DBI iterator so that you can now do this: [% people = DBI.query(...) %] [% person = people.get %] # first person [% person = people.get %] # second person [% FOREACH person = people.get_all %] # third to nth person(s) [% END %] * Fixed Template::Provider which wasn't saving compiled templates to disk when specified with an absolute path, as reported by Merlyn. See http://www.template-toolkit.org/pipermail/templates/2001-July/001213.html * Updated Makefile.PL to accept various command line args including TT_ACCEPT to automatically accept all default values and TT_QUIET to shut the file up with all those yackety yack, yack messages. #------------------------------------------------------------------------ # Version 2.04 - 29th June 2001 #------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Applied a patch from Craig Barratt to both the regular Template::Stash and the alternate Template::Stash::Context which allows array indexes into hashes and arrays (slices) in the same manner as Perl. For example: [% keys = [ 'foo', 'bar' ] vals = hash.$keys # [ hash.foo, hash.bar ] keys = [ 2, 3, 7 ] vals = list.$keys # [ list.2, list.3, list.7 ] %] * Applied another patch from Craig to Parser.pm which fixes a bug relating to text strings being interpolated in a numerical context. See: http://www.tt2.org/pipermail/templates/2001-April/000901.html * Applied yet another patch from Craig ("Man of the Patch" for v2.04 :-), to fix a problem with NEXT not working inside switch: FOREACH and WHILE now get a LOOP: label, and NEXT and LAST now generate "next LOOP;" and "last LOOP;". However, the original code allows naked "NEXT" or "LAST" (which behave like STOP). I didn't want to change this behavior, so NEXT and LAST only get the LOOP label inside loops (except in the top-level atomexpr FOREACH and atomexpr WHILE cases, which should be ok). * Does he ever sleep! :-) Another patch from Craig to improve upon the ref->template mapping feature in Template::View. Documentation pending. For further details, see http://www.tt2.org/pipermail/templates/2001-June/001161.html * Applied a patch from Mark Fowler, which fixes the problem with search/replace virtual methods incorrectly returning with a search pattern of '0'. e.g. [% bob = '0'; bob.replace('0', 'zero') %] now returns 'zero' instead of ''. * Applied a patch from Doug Steinwand to prevent the Stash from raising undef error reporting 'Can't locate object methof "bar" via package "Foo"' unless $DEBUG is enabled. * Applied a patch to the DBI plugin from Rafael Kitover which calls the DBI connect_cached() method instead of connect() to allow connection caching in a persistant server environment (e.g. Apache mod_perl). * Changed html filter to be a dynamic filter factory, allowing the 'entity' option to be set to prevent entities of the form '&word;' being converted to '&word;' [% FILTER html(entity = 1) %] < & > # < & > [% END %] * Changed Template::Stash to propogate any object errors that are references (e.g. Template::Exception objects or otherwise) or string that don't look like "Can't locate object method ...". * Fixed various typos in docsrc/xml/ttdocsrc with a deft: s/Plugin::GD::Graphs/Plugin::GD::Graph/g; * Applied a patch from Leon Brocard to remove a suspect test from t/filter.t which Chris Nandor reported as causing problems. * Added Craig's comments on replace backreferences and TT grammar to TODO list. * Applied various patches from Leon: to remove redundant "print 1..0" in various t/*.t files; to add '1;' to end of '.defaults.cfg' file; and to fix t/vmeth.t and t/leak.t to run correctly under latest bleadperl. * Applied a patch from Jonas Liljegren to fix problems with errors being raised in -T taint mode. * Fixed another problem identified by Jonas so that filters are no longer cached. See: http://www.tt2.org/pipermail/templates/2001-June/001192.html #------------------------------------------------------------------------ # Version 2.03 - 15th June 2001 #------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Added new virtual methods 'item', 'list', 'hash' to each of scalar, list and hash ops to Do The Right Thing to convert the original value to what the caller wants. This is based on a patch supplied by Craig Barratt... * ...which implements a number of new features to the stash, most notably the ability to specify the context in which you want an object method or subroutine to be called in by appending '.list' or '.scalar' to a dotted variable. e.g. [% cgi.param('foo').scalar %]. I haven't folded this patch into the core Stash yet (other than adopting the virtual methods described above) but it's provided as an alternate stash implementation, Template::Stash::Context, which you can create and specify to your Template object via the STASH configuration option. I'd like to a) benchmark it and b) give people the option of trying it out (and hacking on it?) before integrating the new features into the default stash. * Applied a patch to add the Latex filter and GD plugin functionality, thanks to the excellent work of Craig Barratt and Richard Tietjen. In Craig's words: Here is a new version of my Latex filter and GD plugin code. (This adds a latex filter that supports PDF, PS and DVI output, plus 16 or so plugins for the GD::* modules, allowing PNG, GIF output.) [Includes] Richard Tietjen's changes for the latex filter for WinXX [which] didn't make it into the May 20th version. The new version includes the correct changes for WinXX and also now has been tested against TexLive and MikTeX on WinXX. Craig's patch also included full documentation so you can read all about it in the Manual and Module pages. In addition, the Makefile.PL now searches for GD modules and external Latex programs and does some extra user prompting for confirmation of Latex installation/configuration. Not only that, but Craig also managed to roll in a couple of other minor bug fixes and documention updates. Nice work! * Fixed the parser to accept fully dotted up variable assignments in argument lists, e.g. in INCLUDE, etc. You can now do this: [% INCLUDE html/head html.head.title = 'My Title' %] Note however that the assignment to such variables is always "global", even though INCLUDE claims to localise the stash. Remember that the localisation does not perform a deep copy so the localised copy of the 'html' variable might just be a copy of the reference to a previously defined hash array. Thus, you modify the original albeit via a copy of the reference to it. See INCLUDE section of Template::Manual::Directives for further details. * Added 'base' option to Template::View. This allows one view to inherit from another "base class" view. If a template isn't defined in a derived view then it automatically asks its base view for it, and so on up the inheritance tree. [% VIEW myview.default prefix = 'view/default/'; END %] [% VIEW myview.fancy base = myview.default prefix = 'view/fancy/'; END %] In this example, [% myview.fancy.header %] will be resolved as [% INCLUDE view/fancy/header %] or [% INCLUDE view/default/header %] if 'view/fancy/header' doesn't exist. Variables are also inherited. * Added the 'sealed' and 'silent' parameters to VIEW to allow view to be optionally unsealed (allow external variable updates/creation) and to silence warnings about attempts to update sealed variables, respectively. See the Template::Manual::Views page for more info on this and previosu item. * Added the HTML plugin for generating (very basic) HTML elements. See the Template::Plugin::HTML documentation. * Added the present() and content() methods to XML::DOM::Node in the XML::DOM plugin to make them work harmoniously with VIEWs. See the Template::Plugin::XML::DOM documentation for further details. * Did the same for Template::Plugin::XML::XPath, adding present($view) and content($view) methods to XML::XPath::Node::Element and a present($view) method to XML::XPath::Node::Text. See the Template::Plugin::XML::DOM documentation for more details. * Added the calc() method to the Date plugin to return an interface to the Date::Calc module. e.g. [% USE Date; calc = Date.calc %] [% calc.Monday_of_Week(22, 2001).join('/') %] * Moved Template::Tutorial to Template::Tutorial::Web and added the tutorial kindly donated by Dave Cross on generating and using data files with TT as Template::Tutorial::Datafile. Template::Tutorial is now an index to the tutorials. * Changed the bin/tt2inst script to no longer use the 'no_chdir' option of the File::Find module which isn't supported in earlier version such as distributed with pre-5.6.0 Perl. Thanks to a patch from Vivek Khera <khera@kcilink.com>. Changed Makefile.PL to accept File::Spec version 0.6 or later. * Fixed a bug in the FOREACH directive which would barf with the error "undef error - loop is undefined" when DEBUG was enabled. * Applied a patch from Eric Cholet to fix a bug in META data items not correctly escaping ' and \ characters. * Applied another patch from Eric to fix "Use of uninitialised value" warning when using a subclassed parser. * Applied a patch to ttree from Leon Brocard print full path for ignored files. * Fixed typo in the ttree help page which incorrectly listed debug mode as '-d' (now '-dbg' as well as '--debug') * Fixed (hopefully once and for all!) the problem with choming the final newline in a template. The last newline is now chomped just like any other, depending on the POST_CHOMP flag and/or trailing '-' in the directive. e.g. [% FILTER latex('ps') %] ... [% END -%] If you explicitly want a newline then make sure one is added to the end of the template and don't enable POST_CHOMP or add a trailing '+' in the directive, e.g. [% INCLUDE footer +%] * Made a number of fixes to the HTML generated by the Splash! and HTML libraries to make it conformant with HTML 3.2 specificiation. Added DOCTYPE to html/header, ALT tags, ... added html/head, html/body and html/html to do more thorough job using nested variables. Also added html/config to load HTML plugin. Full conformance is still an issue, but we're working on it... #------------------------------------------------------------------------ # Version 2.02 - 6th April 2001 #------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Updated various components of the Splash! library, cleaned up some ugliness (a little) and revised the examples. Documentation in Template::Library::Splash is now hopelessly out of date but examples are more comprehensive. Makefile.PL now prompts user to select a colour scheme for creating the documentation and examples. * Fixed problems with Splash! images displaying the "wrong" colour on certain systems. It appears to be the case that this was automatic gamma correction at work, an otherwise very cool feature of PNG files. Alas it broke things here so we've switched to GIF files. Also made an improvement to the way of generating and using the images. By using simple transparency and doing away with the anti-aliasing it's possible to support any foreground colour for a set of images in a background colour. One set of black images are now distributed with TT. These are blown into many colours during installation, implemented by the bin/gifsplash script and defined as the 'tt2_splash' Makefile target, run automatically as part of 'make install'. * Changed redirect filter factory and the underlying Template::_output method to accept a 'binmode' flag. The bin/gifsplash script sets this flag to ensure that the GIFs generated for Splash! are valid on Win32 platforms (it's a good job SAM knows what binmode is for... :-) * Applied a patch from Leon Brocard to add 'recurse' and 'verbose' options to the ttree.cfg files generated by Makefile.PL. Their absence was preventing the docs and examples from being built (unless, like the stupid author, you already had a default ~/.ttreerc which included these flags :-). * Fixed Makefile.PL to check for File::Spec 0.82, thanks to the efforts of Doug Steinwand and Leon who found and fixed the problem with 'splitdir' otherwise not being available. Later changed requirement from 0.82 to 0.80 because this is the version currently distributed with ActivePerl 5.6.0 and it appears to work just fine (saves those poor Win32 users from having to install any more modules than absolutely necessary) * Removed test for platform specific error messages from t/xpath.t Removed warning from README that this test would fail. Thanks again to Leon for the patch and to <umun@yahoo.com> (no name given) for reporting the problem. * Applied another patch from Leon to fix Template::Base.pm to avoid "Use of uninitialized value..." warnings. * Applied yet more patches from Leon to add "use Template::Plugin" or something similar to the File, Directory and View plugins. 'use base' doesn't work as advertised (e.g. in ensuring the module is loaded) in older versions of Perl. * Fixed t/leak.t to only run one particular test if Perl version is 5.6.0 or greater. Test fails on earlier versions due to destructors being called in a different order. * Updated Makefile.PL to supply a more typical default installation directory for Win32 systems - C:/Program File/Template Toolkit 2/. This brought to light numerous bugs (following) which were fixed with the invaluable help of Simon Matthews and Theakston's Black Sheep Ale... :-) * Pathnames generated in the Makefile.PL for the Makefile are now all "double quoted" to protect embedded whitespace, e.g. when building docs: ttree -f "C:/Program Files/...") * Patched Template/Provider.pm in several places to strip out any extra ':' characters put in the wrong place of a path. For example, when writing compiled template "C:/foo" to disk with a COMPILE_DIR of "C:/bar", the resulting file is now "C:/bar/C/foo" instead of the erroneous "C:/bar/C:/foo". * On Win32 systems, provider prefixes must be more than 1 character in length. This is a compromise for cases where you might want to do something like: [% INCLUDE C:/foo/bar %]. Remains unchanged on other platforms. * On Win32 systems the DELIMITER now defaults to a slight variation of ':' if not otherwise set. It now uses /:(?!\/)/ to split on ':' where not followed by '/'. This makes things like INCLUDE_PATH => 'C:/here:C:/there' work properly, although setting a more suitable DELIMITER for Win32 systems (e.g. ';') is still recommended (we tried automatically setting it to ';' on Win32, but that caused more problems than it was worth). * Changed Template::Provider to consider a file starting (\w:)?/ as an ABSOLUTE path when running on Win32 (e.g. C:/foo). On other platforms, it remains unchanged, looking only for a leading '/'. Also changed ttree to do the same, so that 'ttree -f C:/test.cfg' is treated as an absolute path and it doesn't try and prefix it with the ttree configuration file directory. Note that ttree does this regardless of OS. * Fixed stringification problem identified by SAM. Objects that have auto-stringification sometimes didn't get properly stringified at the right time. e.g. [% a = "$an_obj" %]. * Fixed File and Directory plugins to gracefully ignore Perl dying with "getpwuid() not supported on this platform" errors on Win32. The 'uid' and 'user' attributes of File and Directory plugin objects are left undefined. * Then, hacked t/file.t and t/directry.t test to not be run under Win32. There are a couple of outstanding minor problems with these test scripts caused by differences in '/' and '\' as path separators. Need to fix these at some point. * Makefile.PL now saves configuration options in '.defaults.cfg' file, using these values as defaults when run again. * Removed duplicated $VERSION from DBI and XML::DOM plugins, thanks to Jonathan Leffler. * Updated documentation to reflect new changes. #------------------------------------------------------------------------ # Version 2.01 - 30th March 2001 #------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Added the various template libraries in the 'templates' directory. The 'html' library implements some generally useful HTML elements. The 'pod/html' libraray contains some templates for converting POD to HTML, used in building the TT2 HTML documentation, for example. The 'ps' library contains templates defining a few useful marks and other procedures for generating PostScript pages. The 'splash' directory contains templates for the "Splash!" library which implements a widget set for building stylish HTML user interfaces. * Added a host of example pages in the 'examples' directory which demonstrate use of the above libraries. * Added an 'images' directory to contain the small images used to build up the Splash! interface components. * Added the 'docs' directory containing templates and library elements for building the TT2 documentation as HTML pages. * Updated Makefile.PL to now offer to install optional libraries, images, build HTML docs, examples, etc. Adds 'tt2_install', 'tt2_html_docs' and 'tt2_examples' as Makefile targets if requested. These then get run as part of "make install". * Totally re-organised the documentation, splitting the long user manual into separate Template::Manual::* pages, adding the Template::FAQ, Template::Internals, and various other changes. All POD and HTML documentation is built from the same sources in the form of another set of templates, POD files, XML files, scripts, etc., distributed separately as the 'docsrc' bundle, and available from the web site. The POD documentation now gets glued onto the end of the .pm modules and only creates separate .pod files for those manual pages that don't have equivalent modules (e.g. Template::FAQ, etc.) NOTE: this might mean that existing .pod files from earlier versions of TT might mask documentation in newer .pm files... * Added the Template::View module, the VIEW directive and the View plugin which can be used collectively to create dynamic views. This is a very powerful tool which fulfills a number of requirements and makes possible a number of things that have previously been messy, difficult or not possible. Views are primarily collections of templates. You can define BLOCKs within a view and they remain local to it, but can be called from outside the view. This is still very experimental. Things are likely to change. See Template::Views for (incomplete) documentation and take a look at t/view.t for examples. [% VIEW fancy_html prefix = 'splash/' # template prefix/suffix suffix = '.tt2' bgcol = '#ffffff' # and any other variables you style = 'Fancy HTML' # care to define as view metadata, items = [ foo, bar.baz ] # including complex data and foo = bar ? baz : x.y.z # expressions %] [% BLOCK header %] # define "private" view blocks Title: [% title %] [% END %] [% END %] # end of VIEW definition [% v = fancy_html %] # view is a regular object ref, re- [% mycode(v) %] # assign it, pass it around, etc. [% v.title %] # access view metadata [% v.header(title = 'Foo!') %] # view "methods" process blocks or [% v.footer %] # templates with prefix/suffix added # => [% INCLUDE splash/footer.tt2 %] * Added the facility to specify multiple templates within a PROCESS, INCLUDE, INSERT or WRAPPER directive. For all but WRAPPER, the templates are processed in the order specified. [% PROCESS config + header + menu %] [% INCLUDE section/break + html/titlebar title='A New Section' %] [% WRAPPER edge + box + titlebar %] ... [% END %] Multiple WRAPPER templates get processed in reverse order to create the correct nesting effect. In the example above, the enclosed block is processed and passed to 'titlebar' which wraps it and passes the output to 'header' which wraps it and passes the output to 'box', which wraps it and passes the output to 'edge' which wraps it and returns the output. Thus the specification order is outermost to innermost, but they are actually processed from the inside out. * Templates specified to INCLUDE, PROCESS, WRAPPER and INSERT can now be given a prefix (delimited by ':', as in "file:blahblah.txt" or "http://www.tt2.org/index.html", for example) which maps them to a particular template provider or providers. A PREFIX_MAP configuration option can be specified as a hash array mapping prefix names to a reference to a list of providers. For convenience, you can also specify the argument as a string of integers, delimited by any non-numerical sequence, to indicate indices into the LOAD_TEMPLATES provider list. e.g. my $template = Template->new({ LOAD_TEMPLATES => [ $foo, $bar, $baz, $wiz ], PREFIX_MAP => { src => '0, 2', # $foo and $baz lib => '1, 2', # $bar and $baz all => '0, 1, 2', # $foo, $bar and $baz } }); Thus [% INCLUDE src:hello.tt2 %] indicates the 'hello.tt2' template to be provided by $foo or $baz, [% INCLUDE lib:hello.tt2 %] is mapped to $bar and $baz, [% INCLUDE all:hello.tt2 %] can be provided by $foo, $bar or $baz, and the default [% INCLUDE hello.tt2 %] is mapped to the entire LOAD_TEMPLATES list: $foo, $bar, $baz and $wiz. This is initially useful for things like ttree which would like a way to differentiate between templates in one place and templates in another. It can also be used, of course, to provider special providers for certain file type, as in http://fetch.some.file.com/blah/blah/... * Fixed the parser to accept expressions on the right hand side of parameter definitions for INCLUDE, etc. e.g. [% INCLUDE header title = my_title or your_title or default_title bgcol = (style == 'dark' ? '#000000' : '#ffffff') %] * Added the PLUGIN_FACTORY configuration option to Template::Plugins to allow class names or object prototypes to be specified for plugins. No module loading is attempted, unlike the existing PLUGINS which assumes entries are module names which it tries to load. This may change in a future release (ideally by integration with PLUGINS) so it remains undocumented for now. package My::Plugin; ... package main; my $tt = Template->new({ PLUGIN_FACTORY => { plugin1 => 'My::Plugin', # class name plugin2 => My::Plugin->new(), # prototype obj }, }); * Added the File and Directory plugins which blossomed from the Directory plugin written by Michael Stevens and posted to the mailing list. These give you access to files and directories on your filesystem and also allow you to create representations of abstract files/dirs. WARNING: recognise that this gives the author of any templates you run access to information about your filesystem. We assume that the author of your templates is you or someone you trust to have access to that kind of information. If you're running "untrusted" templates (we assume you know what you're doing) then you'll very probably want to disable these plugins. Alas there is no easy way to disable plugins at the moment other than deleting them or writing null or error throwing plugins to mask them. Making this easier is a TODO. * Added the Pod plugin which uses the Pod::POM module to parse a Pod file or text string and build an object model. You can then walk it and present it in different ways using templates. Great for building HTML documentation from Pod and unsurprisingly used to build the new TT2 docs. * Applied a patch from Chris Nandor to add a new feature to the PRE_CHOMP and POST_CHOMP options. When set to 1, they continue to act as before. When set to 2, all whitespace is collapsed into a single space. CHOMP_NONE, CHOMP_ALL and CHOMP_COLLAPSE are defined in Template::Constants and can be imported as the :chomp tagset, for those who want them. * Applied a patch from Doug Steinwand to fix a problem in Template::Provider which would server stale templates if the modification time of the files went backwards. In addition, it now uses the $Template::Provider::STAT_TTL (time to live) variable (default: 1) to determine how often to stat the files to check for changes. TT2 now supports time running backwards! :-) * Applied a patch from Vivek Khera which fixes a memory leak in the MACRO directive, prevalent when using TT under mod_perl. Also added t/leak.t to test that memory is properly freed and circular references broken by the delocalisation of the stash. All seems to work as expected including plugins that contain context references, MACRO definitions, and so on (but note that this is the test suite run from the command line, and doesn't explicitly test under mod_perl...) * Applied a patch from Axel Gerstmair to fix a bug in PERL blocks and filters which caused references to the context and stash to be kept in global package variables. This meant they stayed alive for far too long. Added a couple of tests to t/leak.t to check this now works OK. * Fixed a bug in the parser triggered by [% CATCH DEFAULT %]. Thanks to Vivek Khera for reporting the problem. This also fixes a problem reported by Thierry-Michel Barral which was causing bare 'CATCH' blocks to not catch errors and instead pollute STDERR. * Fixed another bug in the parser preventing double quoted META attributes from containing single quotes, e.g. [% META title="C'est un test" %]. Thanks to Philippe Bruhat for reporting the problem. * Added the 'indent' filter to indent a block by prefixing each line with a specified string, or a number of spaces when the argument is numerical. * Added the 'trim' filter to remove leading/trailing whitespace and 'collapse' filter to additionally collapse multiple whitespace characters to a single space. * Added escapes for ' (') and " (") to the html filter, thanks to Lyle Brooks and Vivek Khera. Then, having done that, I removed the ' escape because my browser didn't recognise ' as a valid entity. What's going on here? Need to check the HTML spec... * Added tag style 'star' of the form [* ... *] * Changed the Template::Stash get() and set() methods to accept a compound variables as a single parameter and automatically convert it to an array. Note that it doesn't correctly handle arguments to dotted elements (e.g. foo(10).bar(20), but does mean that you can now write $stash->get('foo.bar.baz') instead of the more laborious $stash->get(['foo', 0, 'bar', 0, 'baz', 0]). * Fixed a bug in Template::Stash which was raising an error when an element on the left hand side of a '.' evaluated to a defined, but empty value. * Fixed an obscure bug in Template::Stash which occurred when calling a scalar method on a value which contained a valid and visible object package name. e.g. [% name = 'Foo::Bar'; name.baz() %] called Foo::Bar->baz(). * Fixed a bug in the Template::Stash 'replace' virtual method which returned the original string when the replace string was specified empty. [% var = 'foo99'; var.replace('foo', '') %] now correctly returns '99' instead of the original string 'foo99'. Thanks to Tryggve Johannesson and Jeremy Wadsack for reporting the problem. * Added magical handling of the 'import' variable to stash clone() and update methods. This implements the V1 functionality whereby you can write [% INCLUDE foo import=myhash %]. Note that 'import' is lower case, (V1 was upper case IMPORT) as in V2 it is in keeping with the virtual hash method (e.g. same as myhash.import(another.hash)). Thanks to Brian Cooper for raising the issue. * Yet another change to Template::Stash. Objects which are blessed arrays will now honour virtual array methods if the object doesn't otherwise implement a particular method. For example, you can now write [% USE Datafile(...) %] and then [% Datafile.size %]. The '.size' now works as virtual method on the blessed ARRAY which consitutes the Datafile object. Thanks to Keith Murphy for identifying the problem. * Fixed another obscure bug, this time in Template::Parser which wasn't chomping the final newline in the input string. Thanks to Paul Makepeace for reporting the problem. * Finally identified the cause of an error occasionally being reported by Template::Service when is thrown a non-reference exception. It appears to be a problem interacting with CGI::Carp. For now, it's fixed and tolerated in Template::Service (but could possibly do with a better long term solution?). Thanks to Jo Walsh, Trond Michelson, and I'm sure several others who reported this and helped to track the problem down (and also fixing the confess() bug I introduced when I added the tracer code. D'Oh!) * Removed some old "delegate-to-another-object" code from Template::Plugin, including a nasty AUTOLOAD method which prevented derived objects from acting as transparent hashes. If delegative functionality is required then it should be implemented as Template::Plugin::Delegate (and may well be in the fullness of time). * Fixed a whole bunch of typos and spellos thanks to patches from Leon, Paul Sharpe and Robert McArthur. #------------------------------------------------------------------------ # Version 2.00 1st December 2000 #------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Added the repeat(n), search(pattern) and replace(search, replace) virtual methods for scalars, and fixed a warning in the split() method raised when an attempt was made to split an undefined value. * Changed the THROW directive to accept multiple parameters which become named items of the 'error.info' item, thanks to a suggestion from Piers Cawley. Positional arguments can be addressed as [% error.info.n %] or as a list as [% error.info.args %]. Named parameters can be accessed as [% error.info.name %]. e.g. [% TRY %] [% THROW foo 'one' 2 three=3.14 %], [% CATCH %] [% error.type %] # foo [% error.info.0 %] # one [% error.info.1 %] # 2 [% error.info.three %] # 3.14 [% END %] * Moved the definition of Template::TieString from Template::Directive into Template::Config (for now) to ensure that its definition is visible even if the Template::Parser, and through it, the Template::Directive module, haven't been loaded. This fixes the bug causing the error "Can't locate object method "TIEHANDLE" via package Template::String..." raised when using EVAL_PERL with compiled templates only. In this case, the parser wasn't getting loaded (because it had no templates to parse, them all being pre- compiled) and the Template::TieString defintion wasn't visible to the EVAL_PERL blocks that require it. Added a test to t/compile3.t. Thanks to Igor Vylusko for reporting the problem. * Changed the Template::Directive Perl generator for EVAL_PERL blocks to generate code to first test the EVAL_PERL option in the runtime context and throw a 'perl error - EVAL_PERL not set' exception if unset. Thus the behaviour for EVAL_PERL when using compiled templates is now: if the EVAL_PERL option isn't set in the _compiling_ context, then Perl code will be generated which *always* throws an exception 'perl error - EVAL_PERL not set'. If EVAL_PERL is set, then it will generate code which tests the EVAL_PERL option in the _running_ context (which may not be the same context that compiled it), and throws the same error is the option is not set. Note that [% RAWPERL %] blocks are added verbatim to the generated code if the EVAL_PERL option is set in the compiling context and no runtime check for EVAL_PERL is made. Similarly, [% PERL %] blocks could contain a Perl BEGIN block, e.g. "BEGIN { # subterfuge code here }" which will always get executed at runtime, regardless of any runtime EVAL_PERL option. Thanks to Randal Schwartz for raising this issue. * Fixed an obscure bug in WRAPPER which was causing some variables to have apparently strange values when within the block content. This was due to the content being formed into a closure which was called from within the WRAPPER template, possibly after some variable values had been changed. e.g. [% title = "foo" %] [% WRAPPER outer title="bar" %] The title is [% title %] [% END %] Here, the 'outer' template should be called with a 'title' value of 'bar' but with 'content' set to 'The title is foo'. Previously, the content would have been processed from within the 'outer' template, resulting in a 'content' value of 'The title is bar'. The behaviour is now correct. * Filter failures are now raised as 'filter' exception types, instead of 'undef'. * Applied a patch from Simon Matthews to fix some minor bugs in the DBI plugin: - Added _connect method to Plugin::DBI for backwards compatability with code from version 1 of Template that subclassed the plugin - Changed the new mothod on the DBI plugin so that it checks to see if it is being called by a subclassed object. - Fixed the return value in the DBI plugin when connect is called more than once in the lifetime of the plugin * Removed a dubious looking chomp() from Template::Plugins which may have caused abject stringification of any error object throw by a failed plugin constructor. Thanks to Piers Cawley for finding the devious culprit. * Changed ttree to not offer to create a ~/.ttreerc file if it doesn't exist when the user has specified a '-f file' on the command line. Thanks to Michael Stevens for raising the issue. * Added the match($result, $expect) subroutine to Template::Test. * Modified the final test of wrap.t to strip any trailing whitespace from the output due to a problem with Text::Wrap under 5.005_02. Thanks to Rob Stone for reporting the problem. * Added documentation for DEBUG options and stderr filter. Thanks to Piers Cawley for spotting the omission. #------------------------------------------------------------------------ # Version 2.00-rc2 14th November 2000 #------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Added the 'prev' and 'next' methods to Template::Iterator and Template::Plugin::DBI::Iterator to return the previous and next items from the data set. * Added the 'sort' and 'nsort' virtual methods for hash arrays, thanks to a patch provided by Leon Brocard. * Various fixes to DBI plugin, configuration and test:- modified Makefile.PL to prompt for DBI DSN specific to user's DBD; changed DBI plugin to accept DBI attributes (e.g. ChopBlanks) as named parameters to connect method; fixed t/dbi.t to not munge 'user' variable in final test; added 'ChopBlanks' attributes to satisfy tests under certain DBD's (e.g. Pg). Thanks to Jonas Liljegren and Chris Nandor for their efforts in finding, testing and fixing the problems. * Modified the XML::DOM plugin to work with XML::DOM version 1.27 which now uses blessed array references instead of hashes as the underlying data types. Changed Makefile.PL and t/dom.t to require version 1.27 or later. * Changed the Template::Iterator module to *NOT* automatically expand the contents of blessed ARRAY objects to construct the iteration data set. The previous behaviour caused problems with modules such as XML::DOM where a single object passed to the iterator constructor would be expanded into a list of the member data, rather than being treated as a single item list containing that one object. A blessed ARRAY reference can now provide the as_list() method which the iterator constructor will call to return list data. * Fixed a bug in Template::Provider to ensure that template metadata (e.g. name, modtime, etc.) is written to compiled template files. Thanks to Steven Hetland for reporting the problem. * Changed the Template::Directive::template() generator method to raise an error if a context reference isn't passed to a template subroutine as the first argument. * Fixed t/autoformat.t to use locale dependant numerical formatting. Note that versions of Perl prior to 5.6.0 still have problems and will cause t/autoform.t tests 23 and 25 to fail under locales that use a decimal separator other than '.'. The Makefile.PL will issue a warning in such cases. Thanks to Jonas Liljegren for reporting the problem. * Applied a patch from Leon Brocard which corrects the behaviour of the URL plugin to join parameters with '&' instead of '&'. * Fixed a bug in the AUTOLOAD method of the Template::Plugin base class which caused warnings about not finding _DELEGATE pseudo-hash method under Perl 5.6.0. * Various minor documentation fixes, thanks to Henrik Edlund and Leon Brocard. #------------------------------------------------------------------------ # Version 2.00-rc1 1st November 2000 #------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Added the push(), pop(), unshift() and shift() virtual list methods and fixed the parser to allow empty lists to be created (also fixed the parser to prevent warnings being raised by empty hashes). Updated test scripts and documentation to include examples. Thanks to Stas Beckman for raising the issue. * Incorporated the DBI plugin module, written by Simon Matthews. This features a major reorganisation of the code, fixes a few bugs, removes some lava flow, and has improved documentation and test script. * Updated the Makefile.PL to prompt for DBI test parameters, check for external modules (and in particular, versions which may cause problems) and various other niceties. Also updated the README and TODO files. * Rewrote the XML::DOM plugin, fixing the memory leakage problems and adding the toTemplate() method and friends, as provided by Simon Matthews. Note that it's quite easy to send Perl into a deep recursive loop via the childrenToTemplate() and allChildrenToTemplate() methods due to a misfeature added by abw. This will be fixed in a future release and may result in behavioural changes to the *children* methods, so don't rely on them too heavily for now. * Incorporated the Dumper plugin from Simon Matthews which interfaces to the Data::Dumper module. * Fixed a bug in the Datafile plugin which was causing the last data field to be ignored. Credit due (yet again!) to Simon Matthews for finding the missing chomp(). * Fixed a bug in Template::Directive which was generating a 'Useless use of scalar ref constructor in void context...' for empty BLOCK definitions. * Added the Wrap and Autoformat plugins which interface to Text::Wrap and Text::Autoformat respectively. Thanks to Robert McArthur for the original Autoformat plugin code. * Added the XML::XPath plugin, test script and documentation. * Fixed a bug in the Template::Service module which was using any non-word characters to delimit lists of PRE/POST_PROCESS files. A value such as 'config, header.html' would be interpreted as [ 'config', 'header', 'html' ]. It now uses the DELIMITER value which is ':' by default, e.g. PRE_PROCESS => 'config:header.html' is interpreted as [ 'config', 'header.html' ]. * Fixed a bug in the parser grammar which was failing to correctly identify compound variables that contained two or more consecutive numbers. For example, the variable [% pi.3.14 %] was being interpreted as 'pi' . '3.14', instead of 'pi' . '3' . '14'. * Further modified parser to accept single quoted BLOCK names that would otherwise choke on 'illegal' characters. e.g. [% BLOCK 'foo bar' %] * Changed the Template::Context::template() method to always throw an exception when a template can't be found instead of simply setting an internal error string. Modified other Template::Context and Template::Service methods to expect this behaviour and act accordingly. The visible impact of this is that the Template error() method will now always return an exception object. Previously there were certain cases where a plain error string would have been returned. * Change the ROOT_OPS, SCALAR_OPS, HASH_OPS and LIST_OPS virtual method tables in Template::Stash to incorporate any existing defined values. Previously, you had to 'use Template::Stash' before defining any new virtual methods to prevent them being overwritten when Template::Stash was subsequently loaded. Thanks to Chris Nandor for identifying the problem and suggesting a fix. * Changed BREAK directive to LAST to keep it in line with Perl (don't know why I originally chose 'BREAK' - must have had my C head on at the time). BREAK is still supported as an alias for LAST. * Renamed the Template::Iterator number() method to count(), although number() is still supported for backwards compatability. The DBI plugin used count() instead of number() (an oversight, I think) but I decided that count() was the better name (shorter and more obvious). Also changed internal Template::Iterator counter variables to UPPER CASE to allow AUTOLOAD to be more easily reused by derived iterators such as the one for the DBI plugin. * The Template::Plugin module is now derived from Template::Base. The only significant ramification of this is that plugins should now call the error() method on failure in preference to fail(). The fail() method is still supported and delegates on to error(), but it raises a deprecation warning. * Fixed a bug in the Table plugin which caused an "undefined variable..." warning to be emitted when an empty list was provided. * Renamed 'evalperl' filter to 'perl', something that previously couldn't be done (before ANYCASE) due to 'perl' clashing with 'PERL' reserved word. 'evalperl' is still provided for backwards compatability. Also added 'evaltt' as an alias for the 'eval' filter and 'file' as an alias for 'redirect' (which I claimed to have done back in beta 3 but obviously hadn't). * Fixed a bug in the perl/evalperl filter which was causing a stash reference to be bound in a closure that could later become invalidated. This could lead to variables not getting/setting their correct values in subsequent calls to the same filter. * Documented the problem identified by Chris Winters where an IF used as a side-effect to an implied SET directive doesn't behave as expected. A directive of the form [% foo = 'bar' IF condition %] should be written explicitly as [% SET foo = 'bar' IF condition %] * Documented the 32k size limit (or typically less) for templates when the INTERPOLATE option is set. #------------------------------------------------------------------------ # Version 2.00 beta 5 14th September 2000 #------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Added define_filter($name, \&filter, $is_dynamic) method to Template::Context to allow additional filters to be defined at any time. Arguments are as per the FILTERS configuration option. These filters persist for the lifetime of the processor. * Changed the Template::Context filter() method to accept a code reference as the filter name and use it as the filter sub. This allows filters to be bound to template variables which are then used as: [% FILTER $myfilter %] There is one catch, however. TT will automatically call a subroutine bound to a variable when evaluated. Thus you must wrap your filter sub in another sub: $stash->set('foo', sub { \&myfilter }); or bless it into some class (any class) to fool TT into thinking it's not a subroutine ref: $stash->set('bar', bless \&myfilter, 'any_old_name'); * Updated documentation for FILTER directive and FILTERS option to reflect the above changes. * Fixed Template::Document to run cleanly with taint checking enabled. Unfortunately, this has been achieved by blindly untainting the generated template Perl code before calling eval(). Given that we're reading template source from external files, I don't think there's any way to do reliable taint check anyway. But thankfully we can trust the parser to generate "safe" code unless EVAL_PERL is enabled in which case all bets are off anyway. * Updated XML::DOM plugin to include changes made by Thierry-Michel Barral to accept configuration options for XML::Parser. * Fixed a bug in the Table plugin which caused the first item to be repeated n times when n items was less than a specified number of columns. Thanks to Andrew Williams for finding and fixing this bug. * The Template::Tutorial document really is included in the distribution this time. Honest. #------------------------------------------------------------------------ # Version 2.00 beta 4 12th September 2000 #------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Added the PROCESS config option which allows a template or templates to be specified which is/are processed instead of the template passed as an argument to the Template process() method. The original template is available as the 'template' variable and can be processed by calling INCLUDE or PROCESS as [% INCLUDE $template %]. * Changed what was the CASE option to now be enabled by default, and then changed the name of the option to ANYCASE to make it more obvious as to what it did. You must now specify directive keywords (INCLUDE, FOREACH, IF, etc) in UPPER CASE only, or enable the ANYCASE option to revert to the previous behaviour of recognising keywords in any case. With the increase in reserved words in version 2, there is more chance of collision with variable names. It's a real pain not being able to have a variable called 'next', an exception called 'perl', etc., because there's a reserved word of the same name. Thus, keywords are now UPPER CASE only by default, neatly side-stepping the problem. * Changed the PERL directive so that output is generated by calling print() instead of using the final value in the block. Implemented by tying STDOUT to an output buffer based on a patch sent in by Chuck Adams. new: old: [% PERL %] [% PERL %] print "foo\n"; my $output = "foo\n"; ... ... print "bar\n"; $output .= "bar\n"; [% END %] $output; [% END %] * The IMPORT directive and magical IMPORT variable have been replaced with a general purpose virtual hash method, import(). [% hash1.import(hash2) %] # was "hash1.IMPORT = hash2" [% import(hash1) %] # was "IMPORT hash1" or "IMPORT = hash1" * Modified the Template::Filters provider to examine the FILTERS package hash reference (changed name from STD_FILTERS) each time a filter is requested rather than copying them at construction time. This allows new filters to be added on-the-fly. See t/filter.t for examples and Template::Filters for more info. * Added the 'nsort' list method which sorts items using a numerical value sort rather than an alpha sort. [% data = [ 1, 5, 10, 11 ] %] [% data.sort.join(', ') %] # 1, 10, 11, 5 [% data.nsort.join(', ') %] # 1, 5, 10, 11 * Added 'div' operator to provider integer division (e.g. 'a div b' => 'int(a / b)' and 'mod' which is identical to '%' but added for backwards compatibility with V1. * Changed the (undocumented) FORNEXT directive to NEXT and documented it. * Fixed a bug in the persistant caching mechanism in Template::Provider which was failing to write compiled template files for source templates specifed in the form [% INCLUDE foo/bar %]. Intermediate directories (like 'foo' in this example) weren't being created and the disk write was failing. Thanks to Simon Matthews for identifying this problem. * Fixed an obscure bug in the Template::Stash which was ignoring the last element in a compound variable when followed by an empty argument list. e.g. [% cgi.param() %] would be treated as [% cgi %]. Also fixed the DEBUG option so that undefined variables cause 'undef' exceptions to be raised. Thanks to Jonas Liljegren for reporting the problems. * Added the reference operator, '\' which allows a "reference" to another variable to be taken. The implementation creates a closure around the referenced variable which, when called, will return the actual variable value. It is really a form of lazy evaluation, rather than genuine reference taking, but it looks and smells almost the same. Primarily, it is useful for allowing sub-routine references to be passed to another sub-routine. This is currently undocumented because I'm not sure about the validity of adding it, but see t/refs.t for examples for now. * Changed parser to automatically unescape any escaped characters in double quoted strings except for \n and \$. This permits strings to be constructed that include tag characters. e.g. [% directive = "[\% INSERT thing %\]" %] * Fixed a bug in the use of the 'component' variable when the current component is a sub-routine rather than a Template::Document. * Added the '--define var=val' option to tpage to allow template variables to be defined from the command line. Added support to ttree for various new Template configuration options. * Added $Template::Test::PRESERVE package variable which can be set to prevent newlines in test output from being automatically mangled to literal '\n'. * Completed and corrected all knows bugs in the documentation which now weighs in at around 100 pages for the Template.pm module alone. The POD documentation should now be installed by default. The Template::Tutorial document is once again included in the distribution. #------------------------------------------------------------------------ # Version 2.00 beta 3 10th August 2000 #------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Added the WRAPPER directive to include another template, passing the enclosing block as the 'content' variable. e.g. somefile: mytable: [% WRAPPER mytable %] <table> blah blah blah [% content %] [% END %] </table> This is equivalent to: [% content = BLOCK %] blah blah blah [% END %] [% INCLUDE mytable %] * Added the [% INSERT file %] directive to insert the contents of a disk file without processing any of the content. Looks for the file in the INCLUDE_PATH and honours the ABSOLUTE and RELATIVE flags. Added the insert($file) method to Template::Context which calls the new load($file) method in Template::Provider which loads the file text without compiling it. * Added the DEFAULT configuration option which allows you to specify a default template which should be used whenever a named template cannot be found. This is ignored for templates specified with absolute or relative filenames, or as references to an input filehandle or text. * Added a FORNEXT directive to step on to the next iteration of a FOREACH loop, as suggested/requested by Jo Ellen Wisnosky. I chose FORNEXT rather than simply NEXT because 'next' is a very common variable name but I'm open to better suggestions. Perhaps CASE should be set by default to prevent variable conflict? This might change. * Reorganised the Template::Filters modules and changed the calling convention for requesting filters via the fetch() method. This now expects a reference to the calling Template::Context object as the third parameter (after filter name and reference to a list of arguments). Static filter sub-routines are returned as before and the context has no effect. Dynamic filter factories (denoted by a $is_dynamic flag in the FILTER_FACTORY table) are called to create a filter sub-routine (closure) for each request. The context is now passed as the first parameter, followed by the expansion of any arguments. Filter factories should return a sub-routine or (undef, $error) on error. * Added several new filters: - 'stderr' prints the output to STDERR (i.e. for generating output in the Apache logfile, for example). e.g. [% message | stderr %] - 'file' is the equivalent of the version 1 redirect() filter which writes the output to a new file, relative to OUTPUT_PATH. Throws a 'file' exception if OUTPUT_PATH is not set. There should perhaps be some other way to disable this without relying on OUTPUT_PATH. - 'eval' evaluates the input as a template and processes it. Proposed by Simon Matthews for times when you might be returning templates fragments from a database, for example. e.g. [% dirtext | eval %] - 'evalperl' evaluate the input as Perl code, as suggested by Jonas Liligren. Requires the EVAL_PERL option to be set and will throw a 'perl' error if not (see later item). e.g. [% perlcode | evalperl %] * Fixed a bug in Template::Provider which was mangling the metadata items for the template name and modification time. The [% template.name %] and [% template.modtime %] variables now work as expected. * Added 'component' variable, similar to 'template', but which references the current template component file or block, rather than the top-level template. Of course, these may be one and the same if you're not nesting any templates. * Template::Provider now reports errors raised when re-compiling modified templates rather than ignoring them, thanks to a patch from Perrin Harkins. * Fixed Template::Context to recognise the RECURSION option once more, thanks to a patch from Rafael Kitover. * Overloaded "" stringification of Template::Exception to call as_string(), again thanks to Rafael. In a catch block you can now simply say [% error %] as well as the more explicit [% error.type %] and/or [% error.info %]. * Changed Template module (via Template::Service) to return the exception raised rather than a pre-stringified form. This allows you to test the type() and/or info() if you want, or just print it and rely on the automatic stringification mentioned above to format it as expected. Note that the top-level process($file) method returns a string rather than an exception if $file can't be found. This is a bug, or a possible "gotcha" at the very least, and should get fixed some time soon. For now, test that the error is a reference before attempting to call info() or type(). * Fixed a bug preventing literal newlines from being used in strings. Thanks to Simon Matthews for bringing it to my attention by calling my hotel room at the Perl Conference and saying "Hello? Is that the Template Toolkit Helpdesk? I have a bug to report..." :-) (I fixed it on his laptop a few minutes later - good service, eh?) * Changed Template::Parser to not compile PERL or RAWPERL blocks if EVAL_PERL is not set. Previously they were compiled but switched out at runtime. This was erroneous as rogue BEGIN { } blocks could still be executed, as noted by Randal Schwartz. Any PERL or RAWPERL blocks encountered when EVAL_PERL is disabled will now cause a 'perl' exception to be thrown. * Added a define_block($name, $block) option to Template::Context to add a definition to the local BLOCKS cache. $block can be a reference to a template sub-routine or Template::Document object or template text which is first compiled. * Any other errors thrown in a PERL blocks (assuming EVAL_PERL set) are now left unchanged. Previously, these were converted to 'perl' exceptions which prevented exceptions of other kinds being throw from within Perl code. * Applied a patch from Chris Dean to fix a bug in the list 'sort' method which was converting a single element list into a hash. The sort now does nothing unless there's > 1 elements in the list. * Changed Template::Stash set() method to append the assigned value to the end of any arguments specified, rather than prepending it to the front. e.g. The foo() method called by [% myobj.foo(x, y) = z %] now receives arguments as foo(x, y, z) instead of foo(z, x, y). * Changed Template::Base::error() to accept a reference (e.g. exception) as the first parameter. In this case, no attempt is made to concatenate (and thereby stringify) the arguments. * Added a direct stash() accessor method to Template::Context rather than relying on the slower AUTOLOAD method. * Added an iterator() method to Template::Config to require Template::Iterator and instantiate an iterator, and changed generated code for FOREACH to call this factory method. This fixes a bug with pre-compiled (i.e persistant) templates which were failing if Template::Iterator wasn't already loaded. Thanks to Doug Steinwand, Rafael Kitover and Jonas Lilegren who all identified the problem and hounded me until I fixed it. :-) * Fixed a problem with persistant templates not being reloaded due to the %INC hash. This caused 1 to be returned from require() instead of the compiled template. * Added ABSOLUTE and RELATIVE options to tpage by default. * Applied various documentation and test patches from Leon Brocard. Fixed docs to quote dotted exception types to prevent string concatenation, as noted by Randal Schwartz. Generally added a whole lot more documentation. #------------------------------------------------------------------------ # Version 2.00 beta 2 14th July 2000 #------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Added COMPILE_DIR option. This allows you to specify a separate directory in which compiled templates should be written. The COMPILE_DIR is used as a root directory and each of the INCLUDE_PATH elements is created below that point. e.g. the following options COMPILE_DIR => '/tmp/ttcache', INCLUDE_PATH => '/user/foo/bar:/usr/share/templates', would create the following cache directories: /tmp/ttcache/user/foo/bar /tmp/ttcache/usr/share/templates Templates originating from source files in the INCLUDE_PATH are thus written in their compiled form (i.e. Perl) to the relevant COMPILE_DIR directory. The COMPILE_EXT option may also be used in conjunction with COMPILE_DIR to append a filename extension to all compiled files. * Fixed memory leaks caused by the huge circular reference that is the Template::Provider's linked list of cache slots. Added a DESTROY method which walks the list and explicitly breaks the chains (i.e. the NEXT/PREV links), thus allowing the compiled Template::Document objects to be correctly destroyed and their memory repooled. Thanks to Perrin Harkins for spotting the problem. * Added a work-around in Template::Stash _dotop() to the problem of the CGI module denying membership of the UNIVERSAL class on subsequent calls to UNIVERSAL::isa($cgi, 'UNIVERSAL'). It works correctly the first time, but returns false for all subsequent calls. Changed this generic "is-an-object" test to UNIVERSAL::can($cgi, 'can') on the suggestion of Drew Taylor who identified the problem. * Added t/macro.t to test MACRO directive, t/compile4.t and t/compile5.t to test the COMPILE_DIR option. * More complete documentation, but not yet fully complete. #------------------------------------------------------------------------ # Version 2.00 beta 1 10th July 2000 #------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Template::Context include()/process() now works with raw CODE refs. * Template.pm now prefixes OUTPUT with the OUTPUT_PATH when OUTPUT is a file name. * Cleaned up Template::Iterator. Now derived from Template::Base. Removed ACTION and ORDER now that they are supported as list pseudo methods in the Stash LIST_OPS. * Fixed bug in Provider preventing updated files from being automatically reloaded. Thanks to Perrin Harkins who provided the patch. * Fixed bug in Template::Plugin::Datafile which was preventing a comment from being placed on the first line of the file. * Fixed bug in parse grammer preventing commas in a META list * Added cache persistance by writing real Perl to file (rather than the previous Data::Dumper dump of the opcode tree). Had to re-organise a bunch of code around the parser/provider/document. Activated by COMPILE_EXT configuration item. * Added a work-around in Template::Stash to the problem of CGI disclaiming membership of the UNIVERSAL class after the first method call. * Added AUTO_RESET option which is enabled by default. Disable this (AUTO_RESET => 0) for block persistance across service invocations. * Fixed \@ quoting (and others) in Directive thanks to Perrin Harkins who reported the bug and Chuck Adams who provided a patch. * Added Date plugin and test, as provided by Thierry-Michel Barral. * Integrated changes to Template::Test from version 1.07 and beyond. Now supports -- process -- option in expect, mainly for use of t/date.t et al. * Integrated new upper and lower filters from 1.08, and '|' alias for FILTER from 1.07. * Added new directive.t test to test chomping and comments. * BLOCKS can now be defined as template text which gets automatically compiled into a Template::Document object. * Integrated XML plugins and tests from version 1.07 * Fixed TRIM option to work with all BLOCKs and templates. Moved TRIMing operation into context process() and include() methods. Also changed service to call $context->process($template) rather than call the sub/ doc itself, thus ensuring that the output can get TRIMmed. * Updated Template::Plugin.pm * Added '--define' option to ttree. * Integrated various plugins and filters from v1.07 * Moved Template::Utils::output into Template.pm?) and got rid of Template::Utils altogether. * Fixed bug in Context filter() provider method which wasn't caching filters with args. * [% CASE DEFAULT %] is now an alias for [% CASE %] (the default case), in consistency with [% CATCH DEFAULT %] / [% CATCH %] #------------------------------------------------------------------------ # Version 2.00 alpha 1 #------------------------------------------------------------------------ * first public alpha release of Version 2.00 #======================================================================== # VERSION 2.00 #------------------------------------------------------------------------ # The following list outlines the major differences between version 1.* # and version 2.00 of the Template Toolkit. #======================================================================== New Language Features --------------------- * New SWITCH / CASE statement. SWITCH takes an expression, CASE takes a value or list of values to match. CASE may also be left blank or written as [% CASE default %] to specify a default match. Only one CASE matches, there is no drop-through between CASE statements. [% SWITCH myvar %] [% CASE value1 %] ... [% CASE [ value2 value3 ] %] # multiple values to match ... [% CASE myhash.keys %] # ditto ... [% CASE %] # default, or [% CASE default %] ... [% END %] * New TRY / CATCH / FINAL construct for fully functional, nested exception handling. The block following the TRY is executed and output if no exceptions are throw. Otherwise, the relevant CATCH block is executed. CATCH types are hierarchical (e.g 'foo' catches 'foo.bar') or the CATCH type may be left blank or specified as [% CATCH default %] to provide a default handler. The contents of a FINAL block, if specified, will be processed last of all, regardless of the result (except an uncaught exception which is throw upwards to any enclosing TRY block). [% TRY %] ...blah...blah... [% CALL somecode %] # may throw an exception ...etc... [% INCLUDE someblock %] # may have a [% THROW ... %] directive ...and so on... [% CATCH file %] # catch system-generated 'file' exception ... [% CATCH DBI %] # catch 'DBI' or 'DBI.*' ... [% CATCH %] # catch anything else ... [% FINAL %] # optional All done! [% END %] * New CLEAR directive to clear the current output buffer. This is typically used in a CATCH block to clear the output of a failed TRY block. Any output generated in a TRY block up to the point that an exception was thrown will be output by default. The [% CLEAR %] directive in a catch block clears this output from the TRY block. [% TRY %] blah blah blah, this is the current output block [% THROW some.error 'Danger Will Robinson!' %] not reached... [% CATCH %] [% # at this point, the output block contains the 'blah blah...' line # up to the point where the THROW occured, but we don't want it CLEAR %] Here we can add some more text if we want... [% END %] In general, the CLEAR directive clears the current output from the template or enclosing block. * New META directive allowing you to define metadata items for your templates. These are attached to the compiled template and wrapped up as a Template::Document object. The 'template' variable is a reference to the current parent document and metadata items may be accessed directly. Of particular note is the fact that the 'template' variable is correctly defined for all PRE_PROCESS and POST_PROCESS headers. Thus, your headers and footers can access items from the main template (e.g. title, author, section, keywords, flags, etc) and display them or act accordingly. mytemplate: [% META title = 'This is a Test' author = 'Andy Wardley' copyright = "2000, Andy Wardley" %] <h1>[% template.title %]</h1> blah blah header: (a PRE_PROCESS template) <html> <head><title>[% template.title %]</title></head> <body> footer: (a POST_PROCESS template) <hr> © Copyright [% template.copyright or '2000, MyCompany' %] * New RAWPERL ... END block directive allows you to write raw Perl code which is integrated intact and unsullied into the destination template sub-routine. The existing PERL ... END directive continues to be supported, offering runtime evaluation of a block which may contain other template directives, etc, which are first evaluated (e.g. PERL...END processes the block and filters the output into Perl evaluation at runtime). * New INSERT directive which inserts the contents of a file without processing it. * New WRAPPER directive which processes the following block into the 'content' variable and then INCLUDEs the named file. [% WRAPPER table %] blah blah blah [% END %] [% BLOCK table %] <table> [% content %] </table> [% END %] * Comments now only extend to the end of the current line. [% # this is a comment a = 10 # so is this b = 20 %] Placing the '#' character immediately inside the directive will comment out the entire directive [%# entire directive is ignored %] * The TAGS directive can now be used to switch tag styles by name. Several new tag styles are defined (e.g. html, asp, php, mason). [% TAGS html %] <!-- INCLUDE header --> * The output from any directive or block can now be captured and assigned to a variable. [% htext = INCLUDE header %] [% btext = BLOCK %] blah blah [% x %] [% y %] [% z %] [% END %] # you can even assign the output of loops, conditions, etc. [% numbers = FOREACH n = [2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13] %] blah blah [% n %] [% END %] * The handling of complex expressions has been improved, permitting basic directives to contain logical shortcut operators, etc. All binary operators now have the same precedence rules as Perl. [% foo or bar %] # GET foo, or bar if foo is false (0/undef) [% CALL func1 and func2 %] # func2 only called if func1 returns true [% name = user.id or cgi.param('id') %]. * A new "x ? y : z" operation is provided as a shorthand for "if x then y else z" [% foo = bar ? baz : qux %] * A leading '$' on a variable is now used to indicate pre-interpolation of that element. This simplifies the syntax and makes it consistent with double-quoted string interpolation and text block interpolation via the INTERPOLATE flag. If you've been relying on the version 1 "feature" that ignores the leading '$' then you'll need to change your templates to remove the '$' characters (except where you really want them) or set the V1DOLLAR flag to 1 to revert to the version 1 behaviour. See the 'Gotchas' section below for more details. # version 1 [% hash.${key} %] [% hash.${complex.key} %] # version 2 [% hash.$key %] [% hash.${complex.key} %] * Various new pseudo-methods have been added for inspecting and manipulating data. The full list now looks something like this: [% var.defined %] # variable is defined [% var.length %] # length of string [% var.split(delim, limit) %] # split string as Perl does [% hash.keys %] # return list of hash keys [% hash.values %] # ditto hash values [% hash.each %] # ditto keys and values [% hash.import(hash2) %] # merge hash2 into hash [% list.size %] # number of items in list [% list.max %] # last item number (size - 1) [% list.first %] # first item [% list.last %] # last item [% list.push(item) %] # add item to end [% list.pop %] # remove item from end [% list.unshift(item) %] # add item to front [% list.shift %] # remove item from front [% list.reverse %] # return reversed order [% list.sort(field) %] # return alpha sorted order [% list.nsort(field) %] # return numerical sorted order [% list.join(joint) %] # return items joined into single string Configuration Options --------------------- * Template blocks may be pre-defined using the new BLOCKS option. These may be specified as template text or as references to sub-routines or Template::Document objects. my $template = Template->new({ BLOCKS => { header => '<html><head><title>[% title %]</title></head><body>', footer => '</body></html>', funky => sub { blah_blah($blah); return $some_text }, } }); * Automatic error handling can be provided with the ERROR option. This allows you to specify a single template or hash array of templates which should be used in the case of an uncaught exception being raised in the a template. In other words, if something in one of your templates throws a 'dbi' error then you can define an ERROR template to catch this. The original template output is discarded and the ERROR template processed in its place. PRE_PROCESS and POST_PROCESS templates (e.g. header and footers) are left intact. This provides a particularly useful high-level error handling abstraction where you simply create templates to handle particular exceptions and provide the mapping through the ERROR hash. my $template = Template->new({ ERROR => { dbi => 'error/database.html', # DBI error 'user.pwd' => 'error/badpasswd.html', # invalid user password user => 'user/index.html', # general 'user' handler default => 'error/error.html', # default error template } }); * The INCLUDE_PATH is now fully dynamic and can be changed at any time. The new Template::Provider which manages the loading of template files will correctly adapt to chahges in the INCLUDE_PATH and act accordingly. * The LOAD_TEMPLATES option allows you to specify a list of one or more Template::Provider object which will take responsibility for loading templates. Each provider can have it's own INCLUDE_PATH, caching options (e.g CACHE_SIZE) and so on. You can sub-class the Template::Provider module to allow templates to be loaded from a database, for example, and then define your new provider in the LOAD_TEMPLATES list. The providers are queried in order as a "Chain of Responsiblity". Each may return a compiled template, raise an error, or decline to serve the template and pass control onto the next provider in line. * The CACHE_SIZE option defines a maximum number of templates that will be cached by the provider. It is undefined by default, causing all templates to be cached. A value of 0 disables caching altogether while a positive integer defines a maximum limit. The cache (now built into Template::Provider) is much smarter and will automatically reload and compile modified source templates. * The Template::Provider cache can write compiled templates (e.g. Perl code) to disk to create a persistant cache. The COMPILE_EXT may be used to specify a filename extension (e.g. '.ttc') which is used to create compiled template files. These compiled template files can then be reloaded on subsequent invocations using via Perl's require() (which is about as fast as it can get). The Template::Parser and Template::Grammar modules are loaded on demand, so if all templates have been pre-compiled then the modules don't get loaded at all. This is a big win, given that Template::Grammar is the biggy. * The ABSOLUTE and RELATIVE options are now used to enable the loading of template files (via INCLUDE or PROCESS) that are specifies with absolute (e.g. /tmp/somefile) or relative (e.g. ../tmp/another) filenames. Both are disabled by default. * The LOAD_PLUGINS option is similar to LOAD_TEMPLATES but allows you to specify one or more plugin providers. These take responsibility for loading and instantiating plugins. The Template::Plugins module is the default provider and multiplexes requests out to other Template::Plugin::* plugin modules. Loading of plugins has been simplified and improved in general The PLUGINS option can be used to map plugin names to specific modules and PLUGIN_BASE can map plugins into particular namespaces. The LOAD_PERL option can be used to load (almost) any regular Perl module and use it as a plugin. * The LOAD_FILTERS option is similar to LOAD_TEMPLATES and LOAD_PLUGINS, allowing one or more custom providers to be specified for providing filters. The Template::Filters module is the default provider here. * The TOLERANT option can be used to tailor the behaviour of providers (e.g. Template::Provider, Template::Plugins, Template::Filters) when they encounter an error. By default, providers are not TOLERANT (0) and will report all failures as errors. When TOLERANT is set to 1, they will ignore errors and return STATUS_DECLINED to give the next provider a chance to deliver a valid resource. * The INTERPOLATE option is now automatically disabled within PERL and RAWPERL blocks to prevent Perl $variables from being interpreted as template variables. # INTERPOLATE = 1 This $var will get interpolated... [% PERL %] # but these won't my $foo = 'some value'; my $bar = 'another value'; # etc... [% END %] now we're interpolating variables again, like $var * Added the TRIM option to automatically removed leading and trailing whitespace from the output of templates and BLOCKs. * The CASE option has now been obsoleted and replaces by the ANYCASE option. See comments elsewhere in this document ('Gotchas' below and notes for 2.00 beta 4) for further details. Templates Compiled to Perl Code ------------------------------- Templates are now compiled to Perl code, with credit and respect due to Doug Steinwand for providing an implementation around which the new parser was built. This brings a number of important benefits: * Speed and Memory Efficiency Version 1 used a list of opcodes to represent directives and lower-level operations. These were evaluated by the hideously contrived, and darkly sinister Template::Context::_evaluate() method. In version 2, all templates are parsed and rebuilt as Perl code. This is then evaluated and stored as a reference to a Perl sub-routine which can then be executed and re-executed significantly faster and with far less memory overhead. * Persistance. Once a template has been compiled to Perl code it can be saved to disk as a "compiled template" by defining the COMPILE_EXT option. This allows you to specify a filename extension (e.g. '.ttc') which is added to the template filename and used to create a new file containg the Perl code. Next time you use the template, even if you've shut down your program/server/computer in the mean time, the compiled template is there in a file as Perl code and is simply require()d and executed. It all happens significantly faster because there's no Template::Parser to run. In fact, if all your templates are "compiled" on disk then the Template::Parser and Template::Grammar modules won't even be loaded, further reducing startup time and memory consumption (the grammar file, in particular is rather large). The Template::Provider module handles the loading, caching and persistance of templates, and will examine file timestamps and re-compiled modified templates as required. * Flexibility. Because "compiled templates" are now nothing more than Perl sub-routines, you can use anyone or anything to generate them and run them all under the same roof. Different parser back-ends can generate Perl code optimised for speed or functionality, for example. Or different parsers can compile different template languages (PHP, ASP, Mason, roll-your-own, etc.) and run them alongside regular templates. Or if you don't trust a parser, you can even write your own Perl code and have your templates execute as fast as the code you can write. Other Enhancements and Internal Features ---------------------------------------- * Templates (i.e. sub-routines) now return their generated output, rather than sending it to $context->output(). This speeds things up and makes the code simpler, as well as allowing greater flexibility in how template sub-routines can work. * Exceptions are now raised via Perl's die() and caught by an enclosing eval { } block. Again, this simplifies the code generated and improves runtime efficiency. The [% RETURN %] and [% STOP %] directives are now implemented as special case exceptions which are caught in the appropriate place and handled accordingly. * Local named BLOCK definitions are better behaved and don't permanently mask any real files. BLOCK definitions remain local to the template in which they're defined, although they can be accessed from templates INCLUDEd or PROCESSed from within. The PROCESS directive will export defined BLOCKs to the caller (as with variables) whereas INCLUDE will keep them "private". * The Template::Stash object now encapsulates all the magical variable resolution code. Both simple and compound variables can be accessed or updated using the get() and set() methods, with all variable binding magic happening automatically. * The Template::Context object is now greatly simplified. This acts as a general interface to the Template Toolkit functionality, being a collection of the various other modules that actually implement the functionality (e.g. Template::Stash, Template::Provider, Template::Document, Template::Plugins, etc.) * The Template::Provider object provides a general facility for retrieving templates from disk (or other source), and if necessary compiling via a call to a Template::Parser helper object. Multiple Template::Provider objects may be chained together, each with their own caching options, and so on. * The Template::Parser object now compiles template text into Perl code and then evaluates it into a sub-routine reference using Perl's eval(). This is then wrapped up into a Template::Document object, including any metadata items and/or additional named BLOCKs defined in the input template. * The Template::Document object is a thin wrapper around a compiled template sub-routine. It provides a process() method for processing the template and a blocks() method for returning a reference to the hash array of any additional named BLOCKs defined in the original template text. An AUTOLOAD method returns values of metadata items, allowing a Template::Document reference to be used as the 'template' variable. * The Template::Service module provides a high-level service for processing templates, allowing PRE_PROCESS and POST_PROCESS templates to be specified along with an ERROR handling hash. * The Template::Base module defines a common base class for many of the toolkit modules. It implements shared functionality such as a constructor, error reporting and handling, etc. Modules are now much easier to sub-class, all using separate new() and _init() methods. * The Template::Config module provides methods for loading and instantiating different Template Toolkit modules. Using this factory-based approach makes it far easier to change the default object class for a specific part of the toolkit. e.g. use Template; use Template::Config; $Template::Config::PARSER = 'MyOrg::Template::MyParser'; # $tt object will create and use a MyOrg::Template::MyParser # object as PARSER my $tt = Template->new({ ... }) * The Template::Test module has been enhanced to make it easier to test more advanced TT features. You can now define multiple TT processors and switch between them for different test with the '-- use name --' directive. Also added the '-- process --' directive which can be added after '-- expect --' to hav the expected output processed by TT before comparison. * The Template module remains, as it ever was, a simple front-end to the Template Toolkit. This creates a single Template::Service to which it delegates control for processing templates. Output is returned according to the OUTPUT options specified for the module and/or any output option passed explicitly to the process() method. New Filters ----------- * 'upper' and 'lower' filters perform case folding of text. * 'eval' can be used to evaluate Template Toolkit directives at runtime. * 'perl' evaluates Perl code if (and only if) the EVAL_PERL flag is set. * 'stderr' is a simple filter to STDERR. * 'file' is a new alias for the 'redirect' filter. The OUTPUT_PATH option must be set. New Plugins ----------- * The DBI plugin is now distributed with the Template Toolkit. * The Date plugin formats dates and times via the POSIX strftime() sub. * The Iterator plugin provides access to the Template::Iterator module. * The Dumper plugin provides an interface to the Data::Dumper module. * The Wrap and Autoformat plugins interface to the Text::Wrap and Text::Autoformat modules respectively. * The XML::DOM and XML::XPath plugins provide interfaces to the relevant XML modules. Utility Scripts --------------- * Added the '--define var=val' option to ttree. Gotchas ------- Things that have changed between version 1 and 2 that might catch you out. * Bare CATCH blocks are no longer permitted and must be explicitly scoped with a matching TRY. In most cases, this simply means adding a [% TRY %] to the start of any templates that define CATCH blocks, and ensuring that the CATCH blocks are moved to the end of the file (or relevant place). # version 1 - no longer supported blah blah blah...some error occurs [% CATCH some_kind_of_error %] handler template... [% END %] # version 2 [% TRY %] blah blah blah...some error occurs... [% CATCH some_kind_of_error %] handler template... [% END %] Also be aware that this may change the expected output in case of errors. By default, all output in the TRY block up to the point of error will be returned, with the relevant catch block, and then and further template output appended. You can use [% CLEAR %] within a CATCH block to clear the output from the TRY block, if you prefer. TRY blocks can be nested indefinately. * The ERROR directive is no longer supported. It was very ill-defined anyway and serves no purpose that can't be acheived by defining custom filters, error handlers bound to template variables, or whatever. I haven't implemented any special error or logging facilities, other than the general purpose exception handling, but welcome any thoughts on what or if anything else is needed. * The ERROR option is also different. It could previously be used to specify an error handling sub-routine, but is no longer required (see previous point). The ERROR option in version 2 is used to define a map of error types to template names for automatic redirection for error handling. * The current exception caught in a catch block is now aliased to the variable 'error' rather than 'e'. This is much more logical, IMHO, and was only prevented previously by 'error' being a reserved word. Note that 'e' is still defined, in addition to 'error'. This may be deprecated at some point in the future. * The use of a leading '$' on variables is no longer optional, and should only be used to explicitly to indicate interpolatation of a variable name. Most of the time you *don't* want to do this, so leave the '$' off. This represent a slight shift away from the (optional) Perlness of the language, but I think it's a necessary step to improve the clarity and consistency of the language. As previously discussed on the mailing list, in interpolated text (i.e. a "double quoted" string or regular template text with INTERPOLATE set), both '$foo' or '${foo}' are interpolated as the value of the variable 'foo'. This is good because it is a de-facto standard, consistent with Perl, shell, etc. But inside a directive, [% $foo %] and [% ${foo} %] mean different things, the first being equivalent to [% foo %] or [% GET foo %] (the leading '$' is ignored) but the second actually fetching a variable whose name is stored in the variable 'foo'. In other words, '${foo}' interpolates to the value of foo ('bar', say) and then this is used as the parameter to GET (which itself is optional). Thus, in this case, [% ${foo} %] is [% GET ${foo} %] is [% GET bar %]. This makes more sense if you look at the common example of accesing an entry from a hash array using the value of an variable as the key (e.g. $hash->{ $key }). In version 1, the leading '$' on variables is ignored, meaning that the following are NOT identical. # version 1 [% hash.$key %] # ERROR - '$' ignored => [% hash.key %] [% hash.${key} %] # OK - '$key' is interpolated first It gets more confusing if you excercise your right to add optional leading '$'s in other places (which is one reason why I've always suggested against their use). # version 1 - same as above [% $hash.$key %] [% $hash.${key} %] In particular, that last example should demonstrate the inconsistency. Unlike interpolated text, '$...' and '${...}' are not treated the same and '$hash' is not interpolate while '${key}' is. The only consistent solution I can see to this is to make both '$xxx' and '${xxx}' indicate interpolation in all cases, so that's what I've done. In version 2, the syntax becomes a lot clearer and aligns more closely to a markup language than a programming language. I think this is a Good Thing, but let me know what you think... Here's the Version 2 summary, assuming INTERPOLATE is set. # version 2 my name is $name my name is $user.name my name is ${user.name} [% GET name %] [% name %] [% GET user.name %] [% user.name %] [% GET people.fred %] [% people.fred %] [% GET people.$name %] [% people.$name %] [% GET people.${user.name} %] [% people.${user.name} %] [% INCLUDE header title = "Home Page for $name" %] [% INCLUDE header title = "Home Page for $user.name" %] [% INCLUDE header title = "Home Page for ${user.name}" %] * Changed default TAG_STYLE to only recognise [% ... %] and not the MetaText compatability %% ... %% style. Set TAG_STYLE => 'template1' to accept both, or 'metatext' for just %% ... %% * Changed how error/return values should be returned from user code. All errors should be thrown via one of the following: die $error_msg; die Template::Exception->new($type, $info); $context->throw($msg); $context->throw($type, $info); $context->throw($exception); * USERDIR and USERBLOCK are not supported (they were experimental and undocumented, anyway) * $Template::Directive::While::MAXITER is now $Template::Directive::WHILE_MAX and may change again. * into() filter is now obsolete. You can now simply assign the output of another directive or block to a variable. [% x = INCLUDE foo %] [% y = BLOCK %] blah blah blah [% END %] * The CASE option has been removed and replaced with the ANYCASE option which is the logical opposite. Directive keywords should now be UPPER CASE by default and the ANYCASE option can be enabled to revert to the previous behaviour of accept keywords in any case. * The IMPORT directive and magical variable have been removed and replaced by a general purpose virtual hash method, import(). [% IMPORT myhash %] should now be written [% import(myhash) %] and [% myhash.IMPORT = another.hash %] should be written as [% myhash.import(another.hash) %]