XF 2.2 Template tags not matching in template modification

[kirsty]

In the forum_post_thread template I want to conditionally replace the line

<xf:form action="{{ link('forums/post-thread', $forum) }}" ajax="true" class="block" data-xf-init="attachment-manager"
    draft="{{ link('forums/draft', $forum) }}">

with a different form action.

I thought this could be done using a template modification that finds the above text and replaces it, something like this

<xf:if is="{$forum.my_condition}">
    <xf:form action="{{ link('forums/check-thread', $forum) }}" ajax="true" class="block" data-xf-init="attachment-manager"
    draft="{{ link('forums/draft', $forum) }}">
<xf:else />
    <xf:form action="{{ link('forums/post-thread', $forum) }}" ajax="true" class="block" data-xf-init="attachment-manager"
    draft="{{ link('forums/draft', $forum) }}">
</xf:if>

But though the Test looks ok the modification won't save and the xf:if> is displayed in bright red.

Line 13: Template tags are not well formed. Tag if was found when expecting form. - Template modifications: public:forum_post_thread

So I think it's saying 'hey, you put in a form tag with no ending tag? Which I have indeed done because I only want to modify this bit of this template at this time.

I've tried it with regex and get the same result. I guess I could make the <xf:form bit part of a regex grouping so the replace part of the template would just see a $1 or whatever but that seems needlessly complicating.

Am I missing something?

Thanks.

 

[Old Nick]

Why not just wrap the whole form in your conditional statements?

<xf:if is="{$forum.my_condition}">
    <xf:form action="{{ link('forums/check-thread', $forum) }}" ajax="true" class="block" data-xf-init="attachment-manager"
    draft="{{ link('forums/draft', $forum) }}">
        ...
    </form>
<xf:else />
    <xf:form action="{{ link('forums/post-thread', $forum) }}" ajax="true" class="block" data-xf-init="attachment-manager"
    draft="{{ link('forums/draft', $forum) }}">
        ...
    </form>
</xf:if>

 

[kirsty]

That just seems unnecessarily complicated as a replacement really, not to mention much harder to read! It's 109 lines in the find and replace template modification when I only want to replace a few characters.

I just tried it and it does work, though my first attempt didn't work because the code inside the form had already had another template modification so I needed to get the template modifications in the correct order. It would be nice to keep the separate modifications independent of each other.

Though it'd be more readable/separable as a regex though, I'll go and see if I can get that to work.

 

[Jeremy P]

You could use a ternary:

<xf:form action="{{ $forum.my_condition ? link('forums/check-thread', $forum) : link('forums/post-thread', $forum) }}" ajax="true" class="block" data-xf-init="attachment-manager"
    draft="{{ link('forums/draft', $forum) }}">

 

[kirsty]

You could use a ternary:

Thank you, that's a good idea, and works perfectly well, though it's probably less obvious to my mainly-non-coding colleague as to what's going on, but hopefully he never needs to look at it.

I still think the requirement to have the template modification be a valid fully matched template in itself is a bit excessive and non-intuitive though, but perhaps I'm missing something there. I'd guess that even if you made sure both halves of an if/else left things in the same state then there'd be something else to go wrong. Sometimes I'd just like to override the safety checks! (Whilst mostly being glad of them.)

 

[Jeremy P]

Templates are compiled into PHP, and template modifications are applied before this step (they're essentially invisible to the compiler), so the requirement is really that all template modifications result in a template which is able to be parsed by the compiler. Any syntax which would not be valid in a standalone template will not be valid when produced by a template modification either.

 

[kirsty]

Templates are compiled into PHP, and template modifications are applied before this step (they're essentially invisible to the compiler), so the requirement is really that all template modifications result in a template which is able to be parsed by the compiler. Any syntax which would not be valid in a standalone template will not be valid when produced by a template modification either.

Thank you for taking the time to explain. It really helps when I get frustrated with stuff to know why it is like that!