[html-template-devel] Re: Concerning TBNL and HTML-TEMPLATE - html-template-devel@common-lisp.net - mailman3.common-lisp.net

9 Jun 2005

      Hi Dan!
Please use the mailing lists for future questions like these - see Cc
and the links on the websites.  Thanks.
On Wed, 08 Jun 2005 19:47:00 -0400, Dan Larkin dl9534@albany.edu wrote:
...
First of all let me thank you for your terrific software.  The
availability of your software (and others too) has really helped
my picking up lisp.

You're welcome... :)
...
For the past few days I've been reading c.l.l (but not posting,
because I don't know nearly enough to participate in any of the
current discussions).  My background with lisp began this winter
when I started a course at my University in scheme.  Since then
I've been trying to get going with common lisp and web
programming (since that is what I do during the summer at my
job).

Good luck!  I'm sure you'll have fun with CL.
...
But anyway, on to my question: How can I get a template parsed
with html-template to come up with as a tbnl page?  I'm working
off the tbnl-test example so I have just created a new function
add-artist' and added it to dispatch table, but I can't figure out
how to get it to output the results of parsing a template.

Something like
(defun add-artist ()
    (with-output-to-string (*default-template-output*)
      (fill-and-print-template template/printer values)))
should do it.  Note that FILL-AND-PRINT-TEMPLATE prints its output to
the stream *DEFAULT-TEMPLATE-OUTPUT* and TBNL wants a string returned
by the handler, so the code above makes sure everything printed to
this stream ends up in a string which is returned by the function.
This assumes that ADD-ARTIST is a handler, not a dispatcher.
...
Also another issue I am having is get-parameters, get-parameter,
post-parameters and post-parameter all don't seem to work.  Even
with something like

(defun add-artist ()
  (with-html
   (:html
    (get-parameters))))
    does not work (the way I'd expect it to at least, it produces only
    the prologue and <html></html> even when passed parameters).
WITH-HTML is the macro which uses CL-WHO from the test suite, right?
If that's the case you must wrap the form (GET-PARAMETERS) with
something that asks CL-WHO to include it in the output, otherwise
it'll only be evaluated for its side effects.  One of
(str (get-parameters))
  (esc (get-parameters))
  (fmt "~S" (get-parameters))
should do it.
Does that help?
Cheers,
Edi.