Re: Impressions of EGL - Part Duex

Joe Pluta wrote:
Have you tried dropping a field or a record or an array of records onto a web page? The fact that
the data from the EGL fields is automatically passed
to the page with no work on your part, that's what
I find lacking in any tagging approach...

Joe, you seem to have a misconception about HTML templates used by CGIDEV2 and similar toolkits. They're much different than the "tagging approach" used by Java frameworks. But you can do the research yourself; I just mention it as an aside.

I really wanted to ask about the "no work on your part". What about defining EGL records? And what is it that automatically binds them to fields on the page?

If an RPG program uses templates, you'll see code like the following that inserts field values into a page:

rptVarSet('type':%trimr(codetype));
rptVarSet('desc':%trimr(typedesc));

Notice that the API also allows the %trimr() function to be called, but it could just as well be any other type of data formatting, or even decrypting the field before outputting it. Or if the user is not authorized to see the field, an empty value could be returned. Or the statement could be conditional. This is quite powerful on the one hand, and perfunctory on the other. It's the type of code you could do when your half asleep.

And if it's just too perfunctory, you could write a procedure to automatically map fields from an externally defined data structure to fields on the page with a single function call, which is what the folks at cnxcorp did in their Valence RPG toolkit.

Nathan.