About static attributes
You already know that when using tal:attributes you can mix dynamic attributes with static ones:
<h1 class="main"
tal:attributes="id python:'main-%s' % (25+25)">
Hello World
</h1>
...that produce...
<h1 class="main" id="main-50"> Hello World </h1>Obviously, when you use the same attributes in the static and dynamic part, the dynamic ones take precedence:
<h1 class="main"
id="main-999"
tal:attributes="id python:'main-%s' % (25+25)">
Hello Worldd
</h1>
...that produce...
<h1 class="main" id="main-50"> Hello World </h1>When I learned this behavior, years ago, I started as attitude to remove all static attributes that later would be overridden by dynamic ones (like in the first example). Why? Because in this way is impossible for a developer to do something stupid like don't realize that the attribute is dynamic and not static.
Today I changed my idea because when you begin to look at someone else code, you will like documentation.
Sometimes when you look at a page template made by someone else you don't need (want) to understand the meaning of every single attribute, but a general idea can be enough:
<a href="http://myhost/site/folder/document-to-be-updated" tal:attributes="href view/getSomething"> Update me! </a>In the example above, knowing that "view/getSomething" return a valid URL can be understood because the value is used for an href attribute, but what kind of URL? Is an internal URL? External ones? An URL to a specific view?
To know this we need to investigate the getSomething code, or test the application.
This can be avoided if the original template designer documented an example URL using a static href URL that document more or less the general meaning, exactly like done above.
Playing with attributes order
Let's look at this TAL code that generate XML:
<foo attb="value2"
tal:attributes="attc string:this is C;
atta string:this is A;" />
... that produce...
<foo attb="value2"
attc="this is C"
atta="this is A" />
When mixing static and dynamic attributes, static ones are rendered first keeping the original order, then all dynamic ones again keeping the order.In the example above I'd like to see three attributes in the right logic order, but two of them are dynamic:
<foo atta="value1"
attb="value2"
attc="value3"
tal:attributes="attc string:this is C;
atta string:this is A;" />
... that produce...
<foo atta="this is A"
attb="value2"
attc="this is C" />
So with static attributes you can control also order of dynamic ones.OK, this is not really interesting (commonly who cares of order of attributes inside generated code?) but sometimes you need to controls exactly the generated code. For example, when you wrote functional Python tests, then you check output.
Omissis
Another important thing to learn is omit an attribute dynamically, based on expression. Yes, because with tal:attributes you can also want to control if an attribute must be added to a node or not.
This is very popular when you want to work with an HTML
select element or checkbox:<select tal:define="values python:[1,2,3,4]">
<option name="foo:list" value="1"
tal:repeat="val values"
tal:attributes="value val;
selected python:val==2 and True or False" >
<span tal:replace="val" /></option>
</select>
... that produce ...<select>
<option name="foo:list" value="1">
1</option>
<option name="foo:list" value="2" selected="selected">
2</option>
<option name="foo:list" value="3">
3</option>
<option name="foo:list" value="4">
4</option>
</select>
As you can note, we simply return True or False, without specifying what kind of value we want for the attribute. This is the way for obtaining the standard XHTML value equals to the attribute name.Another example is for attributes where we want to controls also the attribute value:
<div tal:define="foo python:2">
<span tal:attributes="class python:foo==1 and 'fooClass' or None">First</span>
<span tal:attributes="class python:foo==2 and 'fooClass' or None">Second</span>
</div>
... that produce ...<div>
<span>First</span>
<span class="fooClass">Second</span>
</div>
There we are also controlling the class attribute value: we need to specify its value or return None to omit the attribute.Using static default
The last tip! I learned this one recently, looking at 3rd party code.
Sometimes you put in the static node attribute the very-common value of an attribute, for example a class:
<ul>
<li class="veryCommonClass1 veryCommonClass2"
tal:repeat="foo python:[1,2,3]"
tal:attributes="class python: foo==2 and 'veryCommonClass1 veryCommonClass2 selected' or 'veryCommonClass1 veryCommonClass2'"
tal:content="foo" />
</ul>
... that produce ...
<ul>
<li class="veryCommonClass1 veryCommonClass2">1</li>
<li class="veryCommonClass1 veryCommonClass2 selected">2</li>
<li class="veryCommonClass1 veryCommonClass2">3</li>
</ul>
In the example above we used a real static HTML attribute for our nodes (and this is good, also for documentation) but it's annoying to be forced to repeat the whole default value also in the tal:attributes expression.This can be simplified a bit, using default!
<ul>
<li class="veryCommonClass1 veryCommonClass2"
tal:repeat="foo python:[1,2,3]"
tal:attributes="class python: foo==2 and 'veryCommonClass1 veryCommonClass2 selected' or default"
tal:content="foo" />
</ul>
... that produce ... the same output!Seems that the variable default can be used in the tal:attributes expression to get the static value we used.
Unluckily default is not a string but a Python object, so we can't use it also for compose the class value when we need to add also the "selected" class: trying in the expression a
default + 'selected' will raise an error.Thats all! TAL can be a language sometimes tricky! Hopefully we will use all Chameleon in the near future and things will be a little cleaner!
suppose i want show options on link click, & each link will show different options in select box then how its going work through zpt coding, can u pls suggest,
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