[ic] improving awkward IF syntax

Thu Dec 20 17:26:01 2001

On Thu, Dec 20, 2001 at 02:05:20PM -0800, Bob Ramstad wrote:
>    On Thu, Dec 20, 2001 at 12:33:31PM -0800, Bob Ramstad wrote:
>    > Second question.  
>    > 
>    > (Again, I'm a digester, so if you send a response to the list and to
>    > me directly, I'll be able to get this fixed faster.  Thanks in advance
>    > for CCing me directly.  Yow.)
>    > 
>    > One of my goals is to make it so that all the content lives in the
>    > database and is being served from flypage.html.  That's the way we've
>    > got it architected on another system, and we'd like to keep it that
>    > way.
>    > 
>    > I've added products::type and products::orderable as columns to the
>    > products database.  type can be PAGE, ITEM or NIL.  orderable can be
>    > YES or NO.  Using combinations of these settings, I can determine
>    > exactly how to display the page.
> 
> 
>    Christopher F. Miller wrote:
> 
>    You might be able to skip a lot of the logic if you use 
>    PageSelectField.  Have you looked at that?
> 
> This is a really good suggestion.
> 
> Part of me would prefer to have one big ugly flypage with conditionals
> built in so that I can make any look and feel changes in one location.
> (Most of the changes are pretty minor between the different types.)
> 
> That said, it certainly would simplify things a lot to have each of
> the different configurations have a separate "flypage" so debugging
> would be greatly simplified.  I can probably break things down into
> six or so cases, and even write a quick Perl script to populate a
> column for the right flypage to use.  Hmmm.
> 
> I'm still interested in ways to make the ITL syntax cleaner, but this
> suggestion is a good one.  Thanks!

You can probably whip up some sort of perl script that will build the
pages for you from one source file.  There are all sorts of other ways
to keep your pages consistent.

> 
> -- Bob

-- 

Christopher F. Miller, Publisher                               cfm@maine.com
MaineStreet Communications, Inc           208 Portland Road, Gray, ME  04039
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