Does it cause problems if a family is defined on a slot different from kids?
I ask because in a webified cells, you'd probably want to define the model on a :page slot or something.
(defmodel web-app (family) ((page ...) (request ...) (:default-initargs :page (c? (the-kids ....)))
I've made a few macros based on those in celtk that use cl-who to populate an xhtml slot. The families are building up quite nicely now. I am having one problem though. The web pages are constructed using macros like this...
(mk-page (:titile "some page") (mk-div () (mk-text "hello world")))
I created a definehtml macro to make a defmodel and a corresponding mk- macro for a few of the commonly used html elements (I'll do the others as and when required). What I'm not sure about is the mk-text for simple strings. On the plus side, I can use a rule to escape special characters like & et el. Another plus is that we can put all text inside addressable span elements so if only that bit of text updates, we can send the appropriate bit of javascript down to the client that pin-points the change we want.
Here's roughly how one of the mk- macros look at the moment.
(defmacro mk-div ((&rest inits) &body body) `(make-instance 'div ,@inits :fm-parent *parent* :kids (c? (the-kids ,@(loop for kid in body when (stringp kid) collect (mk-text kid) else collect kid)))))) ;; not sure about the parens here, I edited a bit in email
What I'd really like is to examine the type of each form in body to see if its a string. If so, use the mk-text macro to make that string into a family object. What you see above does do that but it doesn't pick up the *parent*, presumably because the macroexpansion of the mk-text bit happens before *parent* has been evaluated. Maybe the easiest thing would just be to use a really short name for the mk-text macro and be done with it.
Cheers, Andy