Forum OpenACS Q&A: What's the deal with pull-down-menus? (+ Testing time)

1: What's the deal with pull-down-menus? (+ Testing time)

Posted by Roberto Mello on 03/27/01 02:03 AM

I was fixing an outer join in admin/pull-down-menus/pdm-delete.tcl and
noticed that the entire module is riddled with links without
extensions, like this one:

I don't know who did that or why, but under AOLserver 3.3.1, it fails
to find the URL. Is there a reason to keep these links without
extensions?

Also, I made a bunch of commits to the CVS tree today. Lots, including
the photodb module ported by Vinod Kurup (addition approved by Ben).
Please fetch that version and test, test, test, so we can make a
release soon.

I went through the SDM and closed a bunch of reports associated with
the fixes. We need to do better in that regard. I think I'll start a
TODO and fix the SDM patch retrieval code so we can improve this
process.

2: Re: links without extensions (response to 1)

Posted by Steven Pulito on 03/27/01 04:02 AM

I don't know who did that or why, but under AOLserver 3.3.1, it fails to find the URL. Is there a reason to keep these links without extensions?

I beleive the reason for leaving off the extensions is to abstract away the mechanism by which you are serving pages, be it html, tcl, adp, or whatever. Therefore when you redesign your site using new technology you don't break your links since .tcl isn't hardcoded. The ACS request processor - see the doc pages - is supposed to figure out what page to serve. At least this is how it worked back in Sept. Back then in the config file you specified what extensions to try and in what order.

hope this helps

3: Response to What's the deal with pull-down-menus? (+ Testing time) (response to 1)

Posted by Roberto Mello on 03/27/01 04:12 AM

But the pull-down-menus module came before this effort I think. If one wan moving from Tcl to anything else (and vice versa) I'd have to change everything anyways, so I might as well make his/her life easier and have the extensions to identify the file, /me thinks.

The issue is that it doesn't work and I want to know if this is broken (in which case we should put the .tcl extensions back in the links) or if this is a feature that's just not working.

4: Response to What's the deal with pull-down-menus? (+ Testing time) (response to 1)

Posted by Michael A. Cleverly on 03/27/01 04:14 AM

This is in the context of OpenACS 3.2.x? I don't know if it's a feature or a bug. If it's in the context of (Open)ACS 4 then it's a feature that isn't working properly.

5: Response to What's the deal with pull-down-menus? (+ Testing time) (response to 1)

Posted by Krzysztof Kowalczyk on 03/27/01 05:24 AM

FYI: I believe I've fixed SDM patch retrieval a few months ago (should be in CVS logs) after 3.2.4. My guess is that openacs.org is still running 3.2.4 without this fix (so it's broken) but CVS version should be ok.