Masterview devel - Nov 2007 - Contemplating an additional masterview rake task

Jeff - greetings from  the swamps of endless kruft, I''m actually 
crawling out a bit and (finally!!!) getting back into some rails work 
and masterview.

Got a partial fix for my long-standing bug that a parse failure needs 
to log better error report so you at least know what template file to 
fix.  I''ve tested, but should see try to put together a unit test for 
this before I submit.

Got a more ambitious fix in mind, but need to explore the 
implementation a bit further.  Right now if you have an invalid xhtml 
file you''re just wedged, nothing gets generated.  I''d like to
add a
backstop which produces a simple error-report page so when developer 
looks at their site they get a stubbed-out page saying "hey, go fix 
your template!!" rather than a missing page error.  The trick is locate 
the mv:generate spec(s) in a page that by definition we can''t parse 
properly - can probably do something with regex matching, but might be 
interesting to allow for trying to parse with a less strict parser 
(say, hpricot) to produce a better broken-page placeholder.  Worth 
exploring or not worth the effort, what do you think?

How about an additional rake task mv:list_errors or mv:list_problems 
that specifically reports bad templates - I think that''d be useful, 
it''s what I think I want more often than the other flavors of list 
tasks I think, and it''s quite trivial to add.  Quick and easy to run 
after you''ve done some editing and gives you immediate feedback w/out 
having to launch your server and watch the log.

And I still owe you conversation on RailsConf proposals, now that my 
brain is getting ruby-ized again.  One of the SDRuby guys gave a talk 
on haml a few weeks ago; interesting contrast, it''s off on the
"let''s
turn everything in the universe into ruby code" track and very diff 
from mv approach.

~ Deb

On Nov 19, 2007 4:44 PM, Deb Lewis <djlewis at acm.org> wrote:
> Jeff - greetings from  the swamps of endless kruft, I''m actually
> crawling out a bit and (finally!!!) getting back into some rails work
> and masterview.

Yay! Glad to hear it! Been swamped over here but things are looking up too
:-)


>
>
> Got a partial fix for my long-standing bug that a parse failure needs
> to log better error report so you at least know what template file to
> fix.  I''ve tested, but should see try to put together a unit test
for
> this before I submit.


Wonderful!!

>
>
> Got a more ambitious fix in mind, but need to explore the
> implementation a bit further.  Right now if you have an invalid xhtml
> file you''re just wedged, nothing gets generated.  I''d
like to add a
> backstop which produces a simple error-report page so when developer
> looks at their site they get a stubbed-out page saying "hey, go fix
> your template!!" rather than a missing page error.  The trick is
locate
> the mv:generate spec(s) in a page that by definition we can''t
parse
> properly - can probably do something with regex matching, but might be
> interesting to allow for trying to parse with a less strict parser
> (say, hpricot) to produce a better broken-page placeholder.  Worth
> exploring or not worth the effort, what do you think?


Yeah, I can see what you mean, something that will clue them into the
problem and provide as much info as possible about where the problem is at.

I am going to need some css selector type functionality for the external
directives work I am planning. I was originally going to look at scrapi
which uses tidy under the covers, but that requires a person to have tidy
installed and configured, so maybe I should look at hpricot. It appears to
have much of the same selector functionality too. Is it pure ruby?, portable
C? It looks like it installs from gem and has a jruby version too.

I''ll try playing around with hpricot over the holidays and see if it
will do
what I need. It looks like it will from the documentation, but I should try
some simple things to be sure.

If it works out then this will be better than scrapi since tidy won''t
be
required or need to be configured.

I am planning on using css selector semantics to be able to hook up external
directives with the pure html files. So I need to locate things using that,
make the changes to the element (adding masterview directive attributes) and
then serialize it back to a string. This will be much better than the regex
solution I was originally planning and much more powerful.

So if you want to take the approach that we use hpricot to find the problem
spots better, then I think that shouldn''t be a problem. Hopefully
hpricot
will be the solution for my css selector needs as well.


>
>
> How about an additional rake task mv:list_errors or mv:list_problems
> that specifically reports bad templates - I think that''d be
useful,
> it''s what I think I want more often than the other flavors of list
> tasks I think, and it''s quite trivial to add.  Quick and easy to
run
> after you''ve done some editing and gives you immediate feedback
w/out
> having to launch your server and watch the log.


Absolutely! That would be a great idea! James Britt had some additional
things that he would do to find problems in advance so we might borrow some
of his ideas. He''s supposed to send me the script of things he would
do.
I''ll forward it when I get it.


>
>
> And I still owe you conversation on RailsConf proposals, now that my
> brain is getting ruby-ized again.  One of the SDRuby guys gave a talk
> on haml a few weeks ago; interesting contrast, it''s off on the
"let''s
> turn everything in the universe into ruby code" track and very diff
> from mv approach.


Yeah, we actually had a guy do it last month at our Ruby meeting. If I was
going to be coding up html from scratch, haml looks like a decent way to go,
but boy I would not want to hand code up anything very complicated these
days. (and the reverse engineering to haml works for simple things but has
issues when getting into complicated html and javascript)

So different things for different approaches. I''d certainly consider
using
it for hand building simple html.

Yeah, lets start working up the ideas for RailsConf. So let''s think
about it
and discuss further when we have a chance.

Have a blessed Thanksgiving!!

Jeff
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