Re: usage of Dataloaders in non-fmpp Java programs

Sunday, June 25, 2006, 8:25:30 PM, Thomas Bayen wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I wrote a nice template set to create a big static website from some 
> CSV-Files. But now I need to create some of the pages dynamically, so I will
> have to use Tomcat, write a web container and call FMPP (or Freemarker?)
> directly.
>
> As I see it is not easy to access the loaded data from within Java. I can't
> just simply say "load the configuration data into this hash", deal with the
> data in Java and say "use this hash with FMPP and create my output".
>
> The Dataloaders (especially the CsvDataLoader) returns a TemplateModel. Would
> it not be nicer if it returns a simple Java-"Map"? FreeMarker would wrap it
> and work as before. What would happen if we try to change CsvSequence to be a
> Map?

You can't do it in general. The TemplateModel-s (these are the
FreeMarker variables basically) has abilities that java.util/java.lang
suff hasn't. Like I can't create a value that is both a Map and a List
with J2SE classes, but I can with TemplateModel-s. OK, most data
loaders don't utilize these things, but for example the CSV data
loader is one that does.

> Your very nice configuration Syntax (tdd, reading of csv, ...) would not
> depend on FreeMarker. I could think of many uses of this nice Dataloaders
> apart from FreeMarker.

Well, these are something to consider when (and if) I write