Smarty

[owczi]

Hi,

I've looked at the forum archives for a while and haven't found a solution, so here's my problem:

I'm displaying a part of the page which is a search form - one text input, two selects. Selectible values are taken from database (DB_DataObjects), then placed in an array, and finally placed in an option list, like this one:

{html_options values=$regionCodes output=$regionNames}

Okay, nice so far. But the template (page header) is cached, and I want it cached, but there's just one thing I want to leave dynamic - form field values. The form has method="GET". I want my form to display the values from $_GET when I submit the form. I wrote myself and registered a tiny function:

function getvar($params, &$smarty) {
$varname = $params['varname'];
return isset($_GET[$varname])?$_GET[$varname]:'';
}

$smarty->register_function('getvar', 'getvar', false, array('varname'));

So in smarty I call like: <input type="text" value="{getvar varname=searchPhrase}"/>

The problem appears with {html_options}. Setting a value there is done via a function parameter, selected=

I tried {html_options ..... selected={getvar varname=searchID}}, but this nesting doesn't work

When I put my {getvar...} call into a {capture} block and save the output to $searchID, it gets cached no matter what. I don't want to leave the whole <select> uncached, cause it will give me extra sql queries that I wanted to avoid. Can you think of any other way to put one function's output into other function's parameter in Smarty?

I know I could solve my issue with javascript, since javascript gives me access to my url's query string, but I wanted to do it in an elegant way, leaving javascript for things like onclick and xmlhttprequest.

{eval} is of no use here, since it's results get cached anyway. How nice would it be if the <select> tag had a "selected=" parameter

Thanks in advance,

owczi

[boots]

See if this is of help to you: http://smarty.php.net/manual/en/caching.cacheable.php and if you are still having troubles, be sure to ask again

NOTE: you will have to manually load and register plugins (including plugins like html_options) for this to work for you.

HTH

[owczi]

Well you see that I used what you pointed in the manual. As to the manual plugin registering, I'd have to disable caching for the whole {html_options function, and if I wanted that, I'd just make a {dynamic block or something. I want to cache the whole {html_options except for ONE parameter, which is selected=. It works with <input type=text, where I can simply put a value="{smarty block}"

Is it doable at all in Smarty? I believe it is, just still wondering how

[owczi]

Haha, I could us ae cache id based on the query string This would solve my problem and give me about 400 cached files after some time ;]

[boots]

[owczi]

Apparently I was just too sleepy to think, now I see it... It is in fact impossible not to loop over the whole option set to do the check where selected="selected" should be, and thus re-run the whole function (and a general conclusion about feature-rich opensource gizmos - if some naturally nifty feature isn't implemented, it's probably not quite possible to do it ). Actually I only needed a quick peek at smarty's sources to get it.

But since I got two select fields in that part of the page, one with 16 options (list of regions in my country) and the second one with about 20 options (category list), that would give me 320 cached template instances, about 2k each. And this is a trivially low amount of diskspace, especially compared to other cached files' amounts. I'll push it on a nice separate reiserFS partition - perfect for lots of small files, and leave it this way (as long as the whole project doesn't finally land on FreeBSD). Maybe a little dirty, but then again who cares these days when diskspace is just a matter of a 'plop!' sound of another hotswap bay being stuffed into the array.

Anyway, I just became another smarty lover out there. Lighttpd + php-fcgi + smarty + little AJAX magic + XHTML is the ultimate source of everlasting joy

Though I'm thinking of a separate database trigger-based project to automatically clear smarty's cache whenever it's needed because of changes in database content. Yay, this is fun.

[owczi]

There, works like a charm

[boots]

excellent keep coming by and telling us your stories, problems and solutions