Module
zope.documenttemplate.documenttemplate

Document templates with fill-in fields

Document templates provide for creation of textual documents, such as HTML pages, from template source by inserting data from python objects and name-spaces.

When a document template is created, a collection of default values to be inserted may be specified with a mapping object and with keyword arguments.

A document templated may be called to create a document with values inserted. When called, an instance, a mapping object, and keyword arguments may be specified to provide values to be inserted. If an instance is provided, the document template will try to look up values in the instance using getattr, so inheritence of values is supported. If an inserted value is a function, method, or class, then an attempt will be made to call the object to obtain values. This allows instance methods to be included in documents.

Document templates masquerade as functions, so the python object publisher (Bobo) will call templates that are stored as instances of published objects. Bobo will pass the object the template was found in and the HTTP request object.

Two source formats are supported:

Extended Python format strings (EPFS)
This format is based on the insertion by name format strings of python with additional format characters, [ and ] to indicate block boundaries. In addition, parameters may be used within formats to control how insertion is done.

For example:

%%(date fmt=DayOfWeek upper)s

causes the contents of variable date to be inserted using custom format DayOfWeek and with all lower case letters converted to upper case.

HTML
This format uses HTML server-side-include syntax with commands for inserting text. Parameters may be included to customize the operation of a command.

For example:

is used to insert the variable total with the C format 12.2f.

Document templates support conditional and sequence insertion

Document templates extend python string substitition rules with a mechanism that allows conditional insertion of template text and that allows sequences to be inserted with element-wise insertion of template text.

Document Templates may be created 2 ways by default:

documenttemplate.String
Creates a document templated from a string using an extended form of python string formatting.
documenttemplate.HTML
Creates a document templated from a string using HTML server-side-include rather than python-format-string syntax.