[Petal] Creating template from string

[Mark Holland]

Hi Michael,

I agree this would be a good feature to have. We are hoping to, in the 
near future, create an I18N preprocessor, which will pre-process and 
populate any i18n:translate tags which do not contain i18n:name tags. 
The idea is to cache per-language versions of each template (maybe using 
Cache::FileCache) which can be read into Petal for normal compilation 
and processing. So being able to construct a template from a string 
could be useful.

One thought though - how will Petal cache the complied version of a 
template created from a string? Perhaps some sort of 'cache key' could 
be passed to the constructor?

~mark

Michael Graham wrote:

>I'm the author of CGI::Application::Plugin::AnyTemplate, which tries to
>create a unified template API for CGI::Application.  Currently it
>supports HTML::Template, Template::Toolkit and Petal.
>
>Where possible, I've tried to smooth over the API differences between
>the modules so that the user can switch templating systems without
>changing application code.
>
>One feature that I haven't been able to emulate in Petal is the ability
>to create a template from a string instead of a file.
>
>    my $string = <<EOF;
>    ...some template text...
>    EOF
>
>    # HTML::Template
>    my $template = HTML::Template->new(
>        scalarref => \$string,
>    );
>
>    # Template::Toolkit
>    my $template = Template->new;
>    $template->process(\$string);
>
>There doesn't seem to be a way to do this in Petal, short of writing the
>string to a temporary file and then passing the file to Petal.
>
>Is this something that could be supported in Petal some day?
>
>It's a useful feature for authors who want to bundle a default set of
>generic templates in the .pm file of their application.
>
>
>Michael
>
>
>
>
>--
>Michael Graham <magog at the-wire.com>
>
>
>  
>