New Message: Re: What Is Static Rendering?

[dbayly at udena.ch]

Hi Tommy,

Well first thing let me says that metadata and static rendering are 
not necessarily incompatible, as some of my clients am using it 
extensively. For example see dynamic[1] and static pages [2]. In this 
example, the static machine is a Unix host, not running Manila many 
tcp hops away from the dynamic server - a Mac.

When Manila discovers that it needs to do a static render, it already 
has a page table. It will need a different page table to do the 
static render, so it saves a copy  and when the static render is done 
, it restores that copy. See  for example in 
manilaSuite.staticRendering.displayRenderButton, the code under
bundle //handle actually rendering the page, if this is a post

Now the problem is this, if something goes wrong in the static render 
the page table is wrong, and Manila's error message usually refers to 
something like, Cant find a table called pt.

So first self help step to investigate what is really going wrong is 
to make the static render part of a try and to restore the original 
page table before trying to report the error.  I did this briefly a 
long time ago, while I debugged the real problems and this is 
something like what I did.

>bundle { //handle actually rendering the page, if this is a post
>	if string.lower (pta^.method) == "post" {
>		if defined (pta^.postArgs.renderThisPage) {
>			local (oldPta = pta);
>			html.deletePageTableAddress ();
>			try {
>				local (pt);
>				pt = 
>manilaSuite.staticRendering.renderPage (relativePath, 
>pta^.adrSiteRootTable);
>				html.setPageTableAddress (oldPta);
>				«Weird, but a delay is needed for the 
>sake of the static server.
>				clock.waitSeconds (1);
>				mainResponder.redirect (pt.url);
>				scriptError ("!redirect " + pt.url)}
>			else {
>				local (err = tryError);
>				html.setPageTableAddress (oldPta);
>				scriptError("Static render failed 
>because " + err)}}}}


You can find the results of my subsequent researches into static 
rendering at [3]



[1] <http://www.udena.ch:8080/glasgowWestEnd/>
[2] <http://www.glasgowwestend.co.uk/>
[3] <http://www.baylys.com:8080/patches/manilasuite/staticrendering/>

>  When I setup static rendering using 
>manilaSuite.staticRendering.renderPage it conflicts with the 
>metaData plugin (it seams that in the pagefilter the metadata plugin 
>can't find the correct pagetable or thread).
>
>  I suspect that the static rendering has to be wrapped in something 
>that resurrects the initial pagetable. And I also suspect this is 
>what manilaSuite.staticRendering.startRenderSession and 
>manilaSuite.staticRendering.endSinglePageSession are suposed to do. 
>But I don't have any success using them.
>
>  Anyone with experience to share?
>
>  /Tommy
>

-- 

- David Bayly.       Programmer and digest reader.     dbayly at udena dot ch
  		Digest Readers do it once a day.