Message: 8 Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2008 23:27:57 +0200 From: "Guillaume Lerouge" <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [xwiki-devs] What is $msg ? To: "XWiki Developers" <[email protected]> Message-ID: <[email protected]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

Hi Kamna,

In the past few days, I have been looking a lot at the Velocity templates

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and the Xwiki core code. There are a few things I am not able to understand.

1) Where is $msg variable defined in the core code? I see it a lot in the scripts. Is it a hashtable for messages. Where is it defined?

$msg is the code used to get translation messages. Basically when you write $msg.translation or $msg.get("translation"), upon parsing of the page by the Velovity parser the engine looks into the translations file. if it finds something such as translation=NiceTranslation, it turns $msg.translation into NiceTranslation when rendering the page.

2) what is referred to by "xpage","xredirect"

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For eg. in the following mehtod from Utils.java

public static String getPage(XWikiRequest request, String defaultpage) { String page; page = request.getParameter("xpage"); if ((page == null) || (page.equals(""))) { page = defaultpage; } return page; }

does this mean, that if a page with that name exists in the template directory(xpage), it will be returned. But, what is defaultpage?

They are used to return specific actions when ?xpage= is appended to a page URL . For instance, /xwiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome?xpage=plain will render the content witout any style, /xwiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome?xpage=print will render the page in print mode...

Similarly, ?xredirect takes another url as a parameter and sends the viewer to the given page. When you try to access a page you cannot see, it's the action used to send you back to the page from the login page.

if xpage = "mypage" then it would pass the control (request) to a vm template file mypage.vm and the rendering or response of the request would be as defined in mypage.vm

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Currently the login page does not show any error if the provided credentials are wrong. (authentication with LDAP) A look at the LoginErrorAction.java in the Web package revealed that it returns the same string as the LoginAction - "login" so, if I created anither loginerror.vm in teh templates folder and returned "loginerror" in the render function of this LoginErrorAction.java class, it would run the new script.

But, at this stage I do not know what would be the content of the loginerror.vm.... #xwikimessageboxstart($msg.get("error") $msg.get("notallowed")) - would this work?

Not quite sure... Though trial & error sounds like a nice tactic ;-)

Guillaume