In order to increase the speed of Pod6 Renderering, it was necessary for the templates to be compiled directly into subroutines. On one hand, this offers the opportunity for the templates to become much more flexible, as data can be manipulated, but on the other hand, the templates become more difficult to understand.

This distribution provides a tool for testing any set of templates against the minimum template set and against custom templates whose structure is passed to it.

Template structure

The templates are collected together into a hash of subroutines. With the sole exceptions of 'raw' and 'escaped', every subroutine has the form

'template-name' => sub (%prm, %tml) { ... };
    # the exceptions are
    'escaped' => sub ( $s ) { $s.trans( ... , ... ); }
    'raw' => sub ( $s ) { $s };

In fact, 'escaped' and 'raw' are treated specially by the RakuClosureTemplater Role. GenericPod provides the information to both as a hash with the text in contents. This text is extracted and sent to the escaped template as a string, and simply returned without template processing for raw.

The hash %prm contains the parameters to be included in the template, %tml contains the hash of the templates.

The %prm keys

Each key may point to a Str scalar or a Hash. Any other structure will be rejected by the test-templates.raku tool, and will most probably throw an exception. In any case, GenericPod does not generate template requests with any other structure.

Within the top-level Hash, the keys may point to a Str, a Hash or an Array. The elements of these are in the table:

The %tml Hash

This is the hash of all the templates, except raw since it is anticipated raw will only be the same as the characters in the string themselves. raw is there to be an alternative to escaped.

The escaped template should be called as

%tml<escaped>( ｢some string｣ )

Another template typically will be called as

%tml<toc>( %prm, %tml)

However, since a template is a normal Raku subroutine, %prm could be substituted with any Hash, eg.,

%tml<title>( { :title(｢Some arbitrary string｣) }, %tml ).

The presence of %tml is to allow for templates to call other templates.