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Template-Flute-0.0009
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/ Template::Flute

NAME

Template::Flute - Modern designer-friendly HTML templating Engine

VERSION

Version 0.0009

SYNOPSIS

    use Template::Flute;

    my ($cart, $flute, %values);

    $cart = [{...},{...}];
    $values{cost} = ...

    $flute = new Template::Flute(specification_file => 'cart.xml',
                           template_file => 'cart.html',
                           iterators => {cart => $cart},
                           values => \%values,
                           );

    print $flute->process();

DESCRIPTION

Template::Flute enables you to completely separate web design and programming tasks for dynamic web applications.

Templates are designed to be designer-friendly; there's no inline code or mini templating language for your designers to learn - instead, standard HTML and CSS classes are used, leading to HTML that can easily be understood and edited by WYSIWYG editors and hand-coding designers alike.

An example is easier than a wordy description:

Given the following template snippet:

    <div class="customer_name">Mr A Test</div>
    <div class="customer_email">someone@example.com</div>

and the following specification:

   <specification name="example" description="Example">
        <value name="customer_name" />
        <value name="email" field="customer_email" />
    </specification>

Processing the above as follows:

    $flute = Template::Flute->new(
        template_file      => 'template.html',
        specification_file => 'spec.xml',
    );
    $flute->set_values({
        customer_name => 'Bob McTest',
        email => 'bob@example.com',
    });;
    print $flute->process;

The resulting output would be:

    <div class="customer_name">Bob McTest</div>
    <div class="email">bob@example.com</div>

In other words, rather than including a templating language within your templates which your designers must master and which could interfere with previews in WYSWYG tools, CSS selectors in the template are tied to your data structures or objects by a specification provided by the programmer.

Workflow

The easiest way to use Template::Flute is to pass all necessary parameters to the constructor and call the process method to generate the HTML.

You can also break it down in separate steps:

1. Parse specification

Parse specification based on your specification format (e.g with Template::Flute::Specification::XML or Template::Flute::Specification::Scoped.).

    $xml_spec = new Template::Flute::Specification::XML;
    $spec = $xml_spec->parse(q{<specification name="cart" description="Cart">
         <list name="cart" class="cartitem" iterator="cart">
         <param name="name" field="title"/>
         <param name="quantity"/>
         <param name="price"/>
         </list>
         <value name="cost"/>
         </specification>});
2. Parse template

Parse template with Template::Flute::HTML object.

    $template = new Template::Flute::HTML;
    $template->parse(q{<html>
        <head>
        <title>Cart Example</title>
        </head>
        <body>
        <table class="cart">
        <tr class="cartheader">
        <th>Name</th>
        <th>Quantity</th>
        <th>Price</th>
        </tr>
        <tr class="cartitem">
        <td class="name">Sample Book</td>
        <td><input class="quantity" name="quantity" size="3" value="10"></td>
        <td class="price">$1</td>
        </tr>
        <tr class="cartheader"><th colspan="2"></th><th>Total</th>
        </tr>
        <tr>
        <td colspan="2"></td><td class="cost">$10</td>
        </tr>
        </table>
        </body></html>},
        $spec);
3. Produce HTML output
    $flute = new Template::Flute(template => $template,
                               iterators => {cart => $cart},
                               values => {cost => '84.94'});
    $flute->process();

CONSTRUCTOR

new

Create a Template::Flute object with the following parameters:

specification_file

Specification file name.

specification_parser

Select specification parser. This can be either the full class name like MyApp::Specification::Parser or the last part for classes residing in the Template::Flute::Specification namespace.

specification

Specification object or specification as string.

template_file

HTML template file.

template

Template::Flute::HTML object or template as string.

database

Template::Flute::Database::Rose object.

filters

Hash reference of filter functions.

i18n

Template::Flute::I18N object.

iterators

Hash references of iterators.

values

Hash reference of values to be used by the process method.

auto_iterators

Builds iterators automatically from values.

METHODS

process [HASHREF]

Processes HTML template, manipulates the HTML tree based on the specification, values and iterators.

Returns HTML output.

process_template

Processes HTML template and returns Template::Flute::HTML object.

filter FILTER VALUE

Runs the filter named FILTER on VALUE and returns the result.

value NAME

Returns the value for NAME.

set_values HASHREF

Sets hash reference of values to be used by the process method. Same as passing the hash reference as values argument to the constructor.

template

Returns HTML template object.

specification

Returns specification object.

SPECIFICATION

The specification ties the elements in the HTML template to the data (variables, lists, forms) which is added to the template.

The default format for the specification is XML implemented by the Template::Flute::Specification::XML module. You can use the Config::Scoped format implemented by Template::Flute::Specification::Scoped module or write your own specification parser class.

Possible elements in the specification are:

container

This container is only shown in the output if the value billing_address is set:

  <container name="billing" value="billing_address" class="billingWrapper">
  </container>
list
param
value

Value elements are replaced with a single value present in the values hash passed to the constructor of this class or later set with the set_values method.

The following operations are supported for value elements:

hook

Insert HTML residing in value as subtree of the corresponding HTML element. HTML will be parsed with XML::Twig.

toggle

Only shows corresponding HTML element if value is set.

input
filter
sort
i18n

ITERATORS

Template::Flute uses iterators to retrieve list elements and insert them into the document tree. This abstraction relieves us from worrying about where the data actually comes from. We basically just need an array of hash references and an iterator class with a next and a count method. For your convenience you can create an iterator from Template::Flute::Iterator class very easily.

LIST

Template::Flute::List

FORMS

Template::Flute::Form

AUTHOR

Stefan Hornburg (Racke), <racke@linuxia.de>

BUGS

Please report any bugs or feature requests to bug-template-flute at rt.cpan.org, or through the web interface at http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/ReportBug.html?Queue=Template-Flute.

SUPPORT

You can find documentation for this module with the perldoc command.

    perldoc Template::Flute

You can also look for information at:

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to David Previous (bigpresh) for writing a much clearer introduction for Template::Flute.

Thanks to Ton Verhagen for being a big supporter of my projects in all aspects.

Thanks to Terrence Brannon for spotting a documentation mix-up.

HISTORY

Template::Flute was initially named Template::Zoom. I renamed the module because of a request from Matt S. Trout, author of the HTML::Zoom module.

LICENSE AND COPYRIGHT

Copyright 2010-2011 Stefan Hornburg (Racke) <racke@linuxia.de>.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of either: the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; or the Artistic License.

See http://dev.perl.org/licenses/ for more information.