The Well-Formed Web

Warning: This interface is no longer supported. The new template format has superceded this interface.

Template Editing is now available in the new versions of the RESTLog Client and Server. The changes to both sides were minimal.

Interface

The URL RESTLog.cgi/template is now recognized and content negotiation is used to differentiate between references and the HTML or RSS template file.

Server Side

On the server side the changes required the addition of a new class TemplateDispatch which derives from BaseHttpDispatch. TemplateDispatch implements 4 member functions which correspond to each of the entries on the table above:

class TemplateDispatch(dispatch.BaseHttpDispatch):
   def PUT_html(self):
      ...
   def PUT_rss(self):
      ...
   def GET_rss(self):
      ...
   def GET_html(self):
      ...

Client Side

In the client two new buttons were added to the GUI, "Edit RSS Template" and "Edit HTML Template". ContentManager gets two new member functions

public void BeginEditTemplate(
   string templateAddress,
   string contentType,
   out string Content)
{
...
}

public void PutTemplate(
   string content,
   string contentType)
{
...
}

RESTLogPublisher also gets a new member function

public void PublishEditedTemplate(
   string filename,
   string contentType)
{
...
}

Lessons

The server side was very easy to extend to accomodate the new functionality, which is due to the way dispatch was designed. Messages are dispatched based on URL, content-type and Verb. The additions to RESTLog Client were not as clean and most of that comes from the model layer code needing a good refactoring, which I will perform and cover later in the week.

N.B. I am note completely satisfied with this solution. It is not easily extensible nor is it generic enough.