Thursday, December 23, 2010

Milestone of a sort: database access

Just wanted to mark the date that I've got rudimentary database access going and build-time database access to modify built content. Result: I can define a Word document template/script that includes a table defined by a query result.

Kind of neat, and it just makes me think of other things I can include.

Latest idea: generalize the "text" tag as a kind of output. When it fires, it asks its parent how to output its contents, and that propagates up the tree, allowing e.g. a document to define how text gets output, but permitting general output for non-Word areas. Add an "output" tag for alternative output handling, and you've got a pretty neat way to handle text.

Then you give the generalized text tag the ability to do Wiki formatting (for which it would also have to ask its parent how to represent different formatting choices) and you've got a really powerful mechanism. I'm pretty sure it would be most of a templating facility, right there. I need to implement it and see what it can do.

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