[Tutor] my solution to #include in DocumentTemplate

[Lance E Sloan]

Just in case anybody is interested (rather unlikely) I thought
I'd let everybody know how I resolved my quest for #include-like
behavior in DocumentTemplate.  Of course, a very good way would
have been to actually create a "dtml-include" tag by following
the suggestions at zope.org.

Being a Python newbie, a Zope not-even-newbie-yet, and under a
tight deadline, I didn't go that route.  Instead, I happened
to stumble across this method.  What I was looking for was
something like:

	<!--#include file="../path/to/filename.dtml" -->

in a DTML file to include another DTML file, recursively.  I
ended up doing this:

	<!--#with "_(incDoc = DocumentTemplate.HTMLFile('../path/to/file.dtml'))"
	-->
	<!--#var expr="incDoc(x = x)" -->
	<!--#/with -->

It works well.  The only problem is that for every object I want
to pass to the included document must be specified individually
(x = x).  I tried these but they didn't work:

	<!--#var expr="incDoc(mapping = vars())" -->
	<!--#var expr="incDoc(mapping = mapping)" -->

For now, this is not too much of a problem, as I'm only including
a header or a footer that's common to all my DTML pages and they
don't require many arguments.

BTW, I think DocumentTemplate is excellent and it should be added to
the standard Python distribution.  For those that don't know my
weird history with this module, I've borrowed DocumentTemplate from
Zope to write some CGIs in Python.  They're coming along nicely,
but I admit that I'm somewhat sloppy.

--
Lance E Sloan
Web Services, Univ. of Michigan: Full-service Web and database design,
development, and hosting.  Specializing in Perl & Python CGIs.
http://websvcs.itd.umich.edu/ - "Putting U on the Web"