freemarker if-else or new if statement - freemarker

I have a site that will print out an article details to the user screen if the article has content.
So I am using
<#if article[0]?has_content>
Then the commands to display the content.
However if the article does not have content I want the screen to display something along the lines of 'The article contains no content'.
I am unsure of the best way to proceed with this, with best practise and what is the most efficient way.
Should I turn my if statement into a simple if-else statement? Or write a seperate if statement along the lines of -
<#if !article[0]?has_content>
(Im unsure of the placement of the !)
Thanks

An <#else> would be more efficient, and more straightforward.

Related

SPSS: Create links/anchors in syntax

Is there a way to create links or anchors within SPSS syntax? Something like linking to a bookmark.
I am making changes and additions to a syntax file, and document these changes at the bottom of the file as comments. In these comments I would like to link to the part of the syntax that was changed. Now I just write the line number, but that changes as I add more syntax, so the reference becomes incorrect.
Bookmarks were the closest thing I found to what I want to do, but I can't turn them into a link. Moreover, I can only create a maximum of 9 bookmarks, which is not enough.
Trying to think creatively here:
instead of bookmarking all the changes, you could break up your syntax into many small syntaxes - each of which contains one of the parts where a change was made.
you can name and number the small syntaxes accordingly.
Then you create one syntax which contains a series of INSERT commands, which calls each of the small syntaxes in turn. You can add titles and remarks between the insert commands, so other users can follow the process and study the relevant small syntax that they need separately.
The Statistics Syntax Editor supports bookmarks - you can have up to 10. Generate a few in the SE and save the syntax file to see how these are represented (hint: look at the COMMENT BOOKMARK lines.

Rainmeter: How to concatenate strings

I am getting data from a broken RSS feed that gives me wrong link. I wanted to fix this link so I made this code:
<link.*>(.*)&.*tid(.*)</link>
and the link could be like:
www.somedomain.com/?value=50&burrrdurrrr;tid=120
But the real working link is in this form:
www.somedomain.com/?value=50&tid=120
The thing that I'm asking is if my measure thing looks like this:
[FeedURL]
Measure=Plugin
Plugin=Plugins\WebParser.dll
Url=[Feed]
StringIndex=2 ;now I only get www.somedomain.com/?value=50
Substitute=#SubstituteFeed#
How am I supposed to concatenate the strings together to complete the url?
I'm guessing rather than &burrrdurrrr;, the link has &, which is how you have to write & in an HTML or XML file.
If that's the case, you just need to set the DecodeCharacterReference option, as described in this handy-looking tutorial. Another option mentioned there is Substitute, which would be able to strip it out even if it really was &burrrdurrrr;.
None of this is a particularly sensible way of dealing with HTML or XML - a much better approach would be a plugin which actually parsed the document structure and let you reference nodes using XPath or CSS rules - but you work with what you've got, I guess. (I've never heard of this "Rainmeter" before, despite its claim to be "the best known and most popular desktop customization program for Windows"; maybe because nobody else calls their program that, instead almost universally using the word "widget"?)

Internalizating content heavy pages into messagefiles seem cumbersome in play2?

Internalization in Play2 can be done with Message.get("home.title") and language files. What about when you internalizate a page full of textual content and not just one specific header or link?
For example doing Messagefile for a long page representing e.g. product info:
_First header_
Some paragraphs of text
...
_Tenth header_
Tenth paragraph and more text*
Messagefile
a)
product.info = "<many paragraphs of text including headers>"
or splitting one page into html elements
b)
product.info.h1 = "<first header>"
product.info.p1 = "<first para>"
product.info.p2 = "<2nd para>"
For me both solutions doesn't sound right. In first having a vast value for a single key seems bad convention and in latter separating a single page into dozens of keys doesn't sound good either.
Big websites often follow the convention www.site.com/en-us/product/1 of having the language in the URL. So the question is, how do i do in this way and is doing in this way a better way at all? I could easily end up not just translating to dozen languages but doing also dozen times layout changes.
I could use global codesnippets using Messagefile for elements that have a little text and doesn't change often e.g. navigation /view/global/header/somenavbar.scala.html but then i end up only having a complex folder structure.
Another way, a best practise, in Play 2 for internalization than messagefile?
Take a look to the Joscha Feth's solution in play_authenticate Java sample.
There are templates for emails in 3 languages for email confirmation, password reseting etc.
Template for each 'type' of email && each language is kept in single file ie:
_password_reset_en.scala.html
_password_reset_de.scala.html
_password_reset_pl.scala.html
_verify_email_en... etc
And for each 'type' there is an 'parent' template, which contains a condition (common Scala's match check the Tags section of template doc) which returns rendered view depending on detected language:
password_reset.scala.html
Finally, yes, at the beginning I also thought that some kind of madness, but believe me, that technique can be useful. There's field for further improvements I think. Maybe it would be better to move the language conditioning to the controller, hm I think that depends on many factors and it will be great if you'll find a time to investigate this topic.

Understanding X-Path Expression

I'm trying to get an understanding of XPath in order to parse a diffxml file. I skimmed over the w3schools site. Am I understanding these correctly?
Statement 1: /node()[1]/node()[3]
Selects the third child of the root node
Statement 2: /node()[1]/node()[1]/node()[1]
Selects the child of the first node of the root node
Statement 3: /node()[1]/node()[3]/node()[2]
Selects the second child of the third node under the root node.
Yes, you understand them correctly, but this is not how you'd use XPath. First node() can be anything, not just elements. Then the pure index is arguably the wort way of selecting things, you should really use names, and possibly predicates for filtering the node-sets.
You'll find a lot of criticism of w3schools on this site. Personally I find it a useful resource, but only when I'm trying to remind myself of something I once knew. It's not really designed for teaching yourself things from scratch, and I suggest you need a different learning strategy. Call me old-fashioned, but when I'm learning a new technology I find there's nothing better than a good book.
You've understood your examples correctly as far as I can tell. But have you understood what a "node" is? For example, do you know under what circumstances whitespace text counts as a node? The key to understanding XPath is to understand the data model, and the way in which the data model relates to the lexical (angle-bracket) form of the XML.

HPricot css search: How do I select the parent/ancestor of a particular element using a string selector?

I'm using HPricot's css search to identify a table within a web page. Here's a sample html snippet I'm parsing:
<table height=61 width=700>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><font size=3pt color = 'Blue'><b><A NAME=a1>Some header text</A></b></font></td></tr>
...
</tbody></table>
There are lots of tables in the page. I want to find the table which contains the A Name=a1 reference.
Right now, the way I'm doing it is
(page/"a[#name=a1]")[0].parent.parent.parent.parent.parent
I don't like this because
It is ugly
It is error prone (what if the folks who maintain the web page remove the tbody?)
Is there a way to tell hpricot to get me the table ancestor of the specified element?
Edit: Here's the full blown page I'm parsing: http://www.blonnet.com/businessline/scoboard/a.htm
The bits I'm interested in are the two tables, one with quarterly results and another with the annual results. Right now, the way I'm extracting those tables is by finding and and moving up from there.
Rohith is right. It is ugly and it is error prone (more than it needs to be). Again as he says it is much more clear with the intent to say "find the closest parent that is a table", and this could go for any child/parent relationship.
If it's "not possible" to do that with hpricot then just say so. But don't just say "it's hopeless to try to do that anyway what's the point". That's a bogus answer. It also doesn't help the next person who comes along (myself) looking for the answer to the same question but for different reasons, which is parsing many pages where differences are ASSUMED and not just feared.
To actually answer the question... I don't know, yet. And I don't have much hope of finding out with hpricot. The documentation is absolutely horridly nonexistent.
But here's a workaround that does about the same thing.
table = (page%"a[#name=a1]").parent
table = table.parent while table.name != "table"
Without seeing the whole page it's hard to give a definitive answer, but often the way you're going about it is the right answer. You have to find a decent landmark, then navigate from there, and if it involves backing up the chain then that's what you do.
You might be able to use XPATH to find the table then look inside it for the link, but that doesn't really improve things, it only changes them. Firebug, the Firefox plugin, makes it easy to get the XPATH to an element in the page, so you could find the table in question and have Firebug show you the path, or just copy it by right-clicking on the node in the xpath display, and past that into your lookup.
"It is ugly", well, maybe, but not all code is beautiful or elegant because not all problems lend themselves to beautiful and/or elegant solutions. Sometimes we have to be happy with "it works". As long as it works reliably and you know why then you're ahead of many other coders.
"... what if the folks who maintain the web page remove the tbody?", almost all parsing of HTML or XML suffers from the same concern because we're not in control of the source. You write your code as best as you can, comment the spots that are likely to fail if content changes, then cross your fingers and move on. Even if you were parsing tabular data from a TPS report you could run into the same problem.
The only thing I'd suggest doing differently, is to use the % (AKA "at") instead of / (AKA search). % returns only the first occurrence so you can drop the [0] index.
(page%"a[#name=a1]").parent.parent.parent.parent.parent
or
page%'//a[#name="a1"]/../../../../../..'
which uses the XPath engine to step back up the chain. That should be a little faster if speed is a consideration.
If you know that the target table is the only one with that width and height, you can use a more specific xpath:
page%'//table[#height=61 and #width=700]'
I recommend Nokogiri over Hpricot.
You can also use XPath from the top of the document down:
irb(main):039:0> print (doc/'//body/table[2]/tr/td[2]/table[2]').to_html[0..100]
<table height="61" width="700"><tbody>
<tr><td width="700" colspan="7" align="center"> <font size="3p=> nil
Basically the XPath pattern means:
Find the body tag, then the third table, then its row's third cell. In the cell locate the third table.
Note: Firefox automatically adds the <tbody> tag to the source, even if it wasn't there in the HTML file received. That can really mess you up trying to use Firefox to view the source to develop your own XPaths.
The other table you are after is /html/body/table[2]/tbody/tr/td[2]/table[3] according to Firefox so you have to strip the tbody. Also you don't need to anchor at /html.

Resources