Template::Tutorial::Datafile
Template::Tutorial::DUseriContributed Perl DocTemplate::Tutorial::Datafile(3)
NAME
Template::Tutorial::Datafile - Creating Data Output Files Using the
Template Toolkit
DESCRIPTION
Introducing the Template Toolkit
There are a number of Perl modules that are universally recognised as
The Right Thing To Use for certain tasks. If you accessed a database
without using DBI, pulled data from the WWW without using one of the
LWP modules or parsed XML without using XML::Parser or one of its sub-
classes then you’d run the risk of being shunned by polite Perl soci-
ety.
I believe that the year 2000 saw the emergence of another ’must have’
Perl module - the Template Toolkit. I don’t think I’m alone in this
belief as the Template Toolkit won the ’Best New Module’ award at the
Perl Conference last summer. Version 2.0 of the Template Toolkit
(known as TT2 to its friends) was recently released to the CPAN.
TT2 was designed and written by Andy Wardley <abw@wardley.org>. It
was born out of Andy’s previous templating module, Text::Metatext, in
best Fred Brooks ’plan to throw one away’ manner; and aims to be the
most useful (or, at least, the most used) Perl templating system.
TT2 provides a way to take a file of fixed boilerplate text (the tem-
plate) and embed variable data within it. One obvious use of this is
in the creation of dynamic web pages and this is where a lot of the
attention that TT2 has received has been focussed. In this article, I
hope to demonstrate that TT2 is just as useful in non-web applica-
tions.
Using the Template Toolkit
Let’s look at how we’d use TT2 to process a simple data file. TT2 is
an object oriented Perl module. Having downloaded it from CPAN and
installed it in the usual manner, using it in your program is as easy
as putting the lines
use Template;
my $tt = Template->new;
in your code. The constructor function, "new", takes a number of
optional parameters which are documented in the copious manual pages
that come with the module, but for the purposes of this article we’ll
keep things as simple as possible.
To process the template, you would call the "process" method like this
$tt->process(’my_template’, \%data)
││ die $tt->error;
We pass two parameters to "process", the first is the name of the file
containing the template to process (in this case, my_template) and the
second is a reference to a hash which contains the data items that you
want to use in the template. If processing the template gives any
kind of error, the program will die with a (hopefully) useful error
message.
So what kinds of things can go in %data? The answer is just about any-
thing. Here’s an example showing data about English Premier League
football teams.
my @teams = ({ name => ’Man Utd’,
played => 16,
won => 12,
drawn => 3,
lost => 1 },
{ name => ’Bradford’,
played => 16,
won => 2,
drawn => 5,
lost => 9 });
my %data = ( name => ’English Premier League’,
season => ’2000/01’,
teams => \@teams );
This creates three data items which can be accessed within the tem-
plate, called "name", "season" and "teams". Notice that "teams" is a
complex data structure.
Here is a template that we might use to process this data.
League Standings
League Name: [% name %]
Season : [% season %]
Teams:
[% FOREACH team = teams -%]
[% team.name %] [% team.played -%]
[% team.won %] [% team.drawn %] [% team.lost %]
[% END %]
Running this template with this data gives us the following output
League Standings
League Name: English Premier League
Season : 2000/01
Teams:
Man Utd 16 12 3 1
Bradford 16 2 5 9
Hopefully the syntax of the template is simple enough to follow. There
are a few points to note.
· Template processing directives are written using a simple language
which is not Perl.
· The keys of the %data have become the names of the data variables
within the template.
· Template processing directives are surrounded by "[%" and "%]"
sequences.
· If these tags are replaced with "[%-" "-%]" then the preceding or
following linefeed is suppressed.
· In the "FOREACH" loop, each element of the "teams" list was
assigned, in turn, to the temporary variable "team".
· Each item assigned to the "team" variable is a Perl hash. Indi-
vidual values within the hash are accessed using a dot notation.
It’s probably the first and last of these points which are the most
important. The first point emphasises the separation of the data
acquisition logic from the presentation logic. The person creating the
presentation template doesn’t need to know Perl, they only need to
know the data items which will be passed into the template.
The last point demonstrates the way that TT2 protects the template
designer from the implementation of the data structures. The data
objects passed to the template processor can be scalars, arrays,
hashes, objects or even subroutines. The template processor will just
interpret your data correctly and Do The Right Thing to return the
correct value to you. In this example each team was a hash, but in a
larger system each team might be an object, in which case "name",
"played", etc. would be accessor methods to the underlying object
attributes. No changes would be required to the template as the tem-
plate processor would realise that it needed to call methods rather
than access hash values.
A more complex example
Stats about the English Football League are usually presented in a
slightly more complex format than the one we used above. A full set of
stats will show the number of games that a team has won, lost or
drawn, the number of goals scored for and against the team and the
number of points that the team therefore has. Teams gain three points
for a win and one point for a draw. When teams have the same number of
points they are separated by the goal difference, that is the number
of goals the team has scored minus the number of team scored against
them. To complicate things even further, the games won, drawn and lost
and the goals for and against are often split between home and away
games.
Therefore if you have a data source which lists the team name togther
with the games won, drawn and lost and the goals for and against split
into home and away (a total of eleven data items) you can calculate
all of the other items (goal difference, points awarded and even posi-
tion in the league). Let’s take such a file, but we’ll only look at
the top three teams. It will look something like this:
Man Utd,7,1,0,26,4,5,2,1,15,6
Arsenal,7,1,0,17,4,2,3,3,7,9
Leicester,4,3,1,10,8,4,2,2,7,4
A simple script to read this data into an array of hashes will look
something like this (I’ve simplified the names of the data columns -
w, d, and l are games won, drawn and lost and f and a are goals scored
for and against; h and a at the front of a data item name indicates
whether it’s a home or away statistic):
my @cols = qw(name hw hd hl hf ha aw ad al af aa);
my @teams;
while (<>) {
chomp;
my %team;
@team{@cols} = split /,/;
push @teams, \%team;
}
We can then go thru the teams again and calculate all of the derived
data items:
foreach (@teams) {
$_->{w} = $_->{hw} + $_->{aw};
$_->{d} = $_->{hd} + $_->{ad};
$_->{l} = $_->{hl} + $_->{al};
$_->{pl} = $_->{w} + $_->{d} + $_->{l};
$_->{f} = $_->{hf} + $_->{af};
$_->{a} = $_->{ha} + $_->{aa};
$_->{gd} = $_->{f} - $_->{a};
$_->{pt} = (3 * $_->{w}) + $_->{d};
}
And then produce a list sorted in descending order:
@teams = sort {
$b->{pt} <=> $b->{pt} ││ $b->{gd} <=> $a->{gd}
} @teams;
And finally add the league position data item:
$teams[$_]->{pos} = $_ + 1
foreach 0 .. $#teams;
Having pulled all of our data into an internal data structure we can
start to produce output using out templates. A template to create a
CSV file containing the data split between home and away stats would
look like this:
[% FOREACH team = teams -%]
[% team.pos %],[% team.name %],[% team.pl %],[% team.hw %],
[%- team.hd %],[% team.hl %],[% team.hf %],[% team.ha %],
[%- team.aw %],[% team.ad %],[% team.al %],[% team.af %],
[%- team.aa %],[% team.gd %],[% team.pt %]
[%- END %]
And processing it like this:
$tt->process(’split.tt’, { teams => \@teams }, ’split.csv’)
││ die $tt->error;
produces the following output:
1,Man Utd,16,7,1,0,26,4,5,2,1,15,6,31,39
2,Arsenal,16,7,1,0,17,4,2,3,3,7,9,11,31
3,Leicester,16,4,3,1,10,8,4,2,2,7,4,5,29
Notice that we’ve introduced the third parameter to "process". If
this parameter is missing then the TT2 sends its output to "STDOUT".
If this parameter is a scalar then it is taken as the name of a file
to write the output to. This parameter can also be (amongst other
things) a filehandle or a reference to an object w hich is assumed to
implement a "print" method.
If we weren’t interested in the split between home and away games,
then we could use a simpler template like this:
[% FOREACH team = teams -%]
[% team.pos %],[% team.name %],[% team.pl %],[% team.w %],
[%- team.d %],[% team.l %],[% team.f %],[% team.a %],
[%- team.aa %],[% team.gd %],[% team.pt %]
[% END -%]
Which would produce output like this:
1,Man Utd,16,12,3,1,41,10,6,31,39
2,Arsenal,16,9,4,3,24,13,9,11,31
3,Leicester,16,8,5,3,17,12,4,5,29
Producing XML
This is starting to show some of the power and flexibility of TT2, but
you may be thinking that you could just as easily produce this output
with a "foreach" loop and a couple of "print" statements in your code.
This is, of course, true; but that’s because I’ve chosen a deliber-
ately simple example to explain the concepts. What if we wanted to
produce an XML file containing the data? And what if (as I mentioned
earlier) the league data was held in an object? The code would then
look even easier as most of the code we’ve written earlier would be
hidden away in "FootballLeague.pm".
use FootballLeague;
use Template;
my $league = FootballLeague->new(name => ’English Premier’);
my $tt = Template->new;
$tt->process(’league_xml.tt’, { league => $league })
││ die $tt->error;
And the template in "league_xml.tt" would look something like this:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE LEAGUE SYSTEM "league.dtd">
<league name="[% league.name %]" season="[% league.season %]">
[% FOREACH team = league.teams -%]
<team name="[% team.name %]"
pos="[% team.pos %]"
played="[% team.pl %]"
goal_diff="[% team.gd %]"
points="[% team.pt %]">
<stats type="home">
win="[% team.hw %]"
draw="[%- team.hd %]"
lose="[% team.hl %]"
for="[% team.hf %]"
against="[% team.ha %]" />
<stats type="away">
win="[% team.aw %]"
draw="[%- team.ad %]"
lose="[% team.al %]"
for="[% team.af %]"
against="[% team.aa %]" />
</team>
[% END -%]
&/league>
Notice that as we’ve passed the whole object into "process" then we
need to put an extra level of indirection on our template variables -
everything is now a component of the "league" variable. Other than
that, everything in the template is very similar to what we’ve used
before. Presumably now "team.name" calls an accessor function rather
than carrying out a hash lookup, but all of this is transparent to our
template designer.
Multiple Formats
As a final example, let’s suppose that we need to create output foot-
ball league tables in a number of formats. Perhaps we are passing this
data on to other people and they can’t all use the same format. Some
of our users need CSV files and others need XML. Some require data
split between home and away matches and other just want the totals. In
total, then, we’ll need four different templates, but the good news is
that they can use the same data object. All the script needs to do is
to establish which template is required and process it.
use FootballLeague;
use Template;
my ($name, $type, $stats) = @_;
my $league = FootballLeague->new(name => $name);
my $tt = Template->new;
$tt->process("league_${type}_$stats.tt",
{ league => $league }
"league_$stats.$type")
││ die $tt->error;
For example, you can call this script as
league.pl ’English Premier’ xml split
This will process a template called "league_xml_split.tt" and put the
results in a file called "league_split.xml".
This starts to show the true strength of the Template Toolkit. If we
later wanted to add another file format - perhaps we wanted to create
a league table HTML page or even a LaTeX document - then we would just
need to create the appropriate template and name it according to our
existing naming convention. We would need to make no changes to the
code.
I hope you can now see why the Template Toolkit is fast becoming an
essential part of many people’s Perl installation.
AUTHOR
Dave Cross <dave@dave.org.uk>
VERSION
Template Toolkit version 2.19, released on 27 April 2007.
COPYRIGHT
Copyright (C) 2001 Dave Cross <dave@dave.org.uk>
This module is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the same terms as Perl itself.
perl v5.8.8 2008-08-08 Template::Tutorial::Datafile(3)
