29 Aug
2012
29 Aug
'12
5:02 p.m.
On Aug 29, 2012, at 2:46 PM, Marius Dumitru Florea <mariusdumitru.florea(a)xwiki.com>
wrote:
Hi devs,
The {{velocity}} macro has a nice filter that removes the whitespace
from the start of each line. This allows us to format (indent) the
Velocity code without generating whitespace garbage.
Recently I had to move some Velocity macros from a wiki page to a
Velocity template file and the absence of this filter turned out to be
a pita. Even if my macros were generating HTML, consecutive
whitespaces were collapsed into a single one which was still visible,
breaking my layout a little. Some of my macros were generating Strings
which now contained a lot of whitespace. I had to update my functional
tests to trim the actual text taken from the UI whenever asserting
something.
WDYT about applying the same filter when parsing Velocity templates?
Do you see any problems with ignoring the whitespace at the start of
the line?
Couldn't this cause backward compat issues for templates for which whitespaces at the
beginning of lines were used?
My POV is that we should use the Rendering engine to parse templates (and even better,
remove templates altogether but that could be done in a second step later on). We just
need to invent something for handling backward compatibility. It could be based on the
file extension since the files would not longer be velocity (vm) files. They could have
some other extension, like .xwiki, .x, .txt, .content, .template, .tpl, etc. If we find
.vm files we use the old way and if we find the new extension we render them using the
Rendering engine.
There are lots of pros for doing this and not just the whitespace ignoring.
Thanks
-Vincent