Quickstart 6: Adding a Site-Wide Template

In Quickstart 5, we looked at how <result> tags with a NAME attribute can be used to conditionally run other event handlers.

However, what if we always want to run an additional event handler? Easy: don't give it a NAME attribute.

If you look at your ModelGlue.xml file, there's an event handler named "template.main." It doesn't do much: no messages, no results, just a single <include>.

The include, though, is special. Open it up. (/translator/views/main.cfm).

See Line #16? "viewcollection.getView('body')"? What's with that?

Model-Glue makes it easy to display the rendered HTML from one view inside of another. In all of your .CFM view templates, a variable named "viewcollection" is available. To display the rendered HTML from a prior view, simply run getView(), passing it the value of the desired view's NAME attribute.

In English: because we named our <include> for frmPhrase.cfm and dspPhrase.cfm "body", we could use this event-handler to display a "wrapper" around their content.

If only we could tell Model-Glue to run the view.template event handler after translationForm and translationFormAction.

Well, we could use a result tag, give it a name of "doTemplate," and always add the result in a Controller function. But that'd be tedious.

Instead, we can use an unnamed result. Any unnamed result is considered "implicit," and will always be executed.

So, if we add the following <result> tag to our ModelGlue.xml event handlers for the translation form and its action page, we can cause the view.template event handler to execute:

<result do="view.template" />

I'd show you the XML, but I did say there was a quiz at the end. When you've added the result and gotten the sitewide template to work, you've finished the Quickstart!

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