topic Re: [Surf] Nested freemarker components render wrong in Alfresco Archive

[Surf] Nested freemarker components render wrong

petern — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 17:28:04 GMT

Hi all,I've had a quick look and can't find out much about why this could be happening, so thought I'd ask here as we don't seem to have a Surf forum yet.I have come across an issue which occurs if nested <@region>s are used within Freemarker-rendered components. I have a feeling I'm doing som

Re: [Surf] Nested freemarker components render wrong

petern — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 17:32:31 GMT

Anyone? I've now tried this with template-scoped components and the same thing happens; regions within a component are insta-rendered.

We're trying to migrate a very simple website from another CMS (InfoGlue) as an experiment in preparation for switching to Alfresco WCM + Surf (+ WebStudio) for future sites, and are experimenting to find out if we can maintain our component structure in a similar manner to how we do with InfoGlue.
So far I've managed to establish that we wont be able to keep everything entirely the same, as the repository access will be handled entirely differently, however things are looking quite promising for being able to translate much of our page-building component logic directly to Surf… if it is possible to nest components. If not, it's no project-killer as we can flatten things, but we'll need to design a new set of components for one or two tasks before we can begin developing. Therefore I'd appreciate if someone knowledgeable could enlighten me; is nested-componentisation a lost battle/impossible with Surf?

Adoption of Alfresco WCM + Surf for producing websites is 'inevitable' I think, however we need to know if our construction methods would have to change from a kind of wedding-cake to a kind of uber-pizza. Experience so far suggests that the answer is yes: it's pizza time.

Re: [Surf] Nested freemarker components render wrong

kevinr — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 09:51:33 GMT

Hi,

Thanks for your detailed question. SURF components cannot be currently be nested - in that a component cannot contain another 'region' tag. The design of SURF is based around the idea that components will be discrete packaged units that do not need to depend on other components - in fact they don't even need to depend on the SURF framework as some could be executed as plain WebScripts, they are just specialised WebScripts and we don't support nested WebScripts.

Thanks,

Kevin

Re: [Surf] Nested freemarker components render wrong

petern — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 10:02:11 GMT

Thanks Kevin, it does make sense when you think of it that way.

Cheers.