The DVD Chief template engine used in generation of movie and person template and html export. The template engine has most features of Smarty PHP template engine.

Source: http://dvdchief.com/delphi

Compilers

Tested with RAD XE2, RAD 10.3 and FPC 3.3.1.

This repo contains some modifications to the original sources:

Changed

• TVariableRecord can typecast from Variant

• In TNamespaceProvider, pure callback mechanism of returning key options changed to hybrid pre-set/callback one. Initial options could be set in constructor and descendants are free to override getter methods. GetName, IsIndexSupported, UseCache are not abstract anymore, they return field values now. This allows to skip declaration of TNamespaceProvider descendant class in most cases.

• TVariableArrayItem.Key is string instead of Pointer

• Only Int64 numbers are used instead of Integer. TVariableRecord.As/Is/Set/ToInteger => .As/Is/Set/ToInt

• All string and record parameters are const for better performance. Many parameters marked as out instead of var.

• TVariableRecord class operators removed (wasn’t used)

Added

• TStorageNamespaceProvider - a TNamespaceProvider descendant that can store variables (both single and arrays) inside so there’s no need in overriding GetVariable method.

• Helper routines Arr (pack array of values into single TVariableRecord), Item and Map (create key-value pairs into single TVariableRecord). Together they help creating complex data structures from constant parameters:

  Namesp.SetVariable('Bands',
    Arr([
      Map([
        Item('Name', 'Manowar'),
        Item('Year', 1980),
        Item('Genre', ['Heavy metal', 'Epic metal']),
        Item('Lineup',
          [
            Map([
              Item('Name', 'Eric Adams'),
              Item('Instrument', 'Vocals')
            ]),
            Map([
              Item('Name', 'Joey DeMaio'),
              Item('Instrument', 'Bass')
            ]),
            ...
          ])
        )
      ]),
      ...
    ])
  );

• TSmartyEngine.Execute overloaded version - a somewhat simplified wrapper

• SmartyExec - even more simplified, a function that hides almost all engine interface

• Implemented option for engine to strip line breaks after block tags (if, foreach etc): TSmartyEngine.StripLineBreaksAfterBlocks property

• Unit-local FormatSettings and API for changing it: SmartyDefaultFormatSettings, SmartyGetFormatSettings, SmartySetFormatSettings. No more dependency on global SysUtils.FormatSettings. By default FormatSettings are invariant having following values:

  TimeSeparator := ':';
  ShortTimeFormat := 'hh:nn';
  LongTimeFormat := 'hhss';
  DateSeparator := '.';
  ShortDateFormat := 'dd/MM/yyyy';
  LongDateFormat := 'dd/MM/yyyy HHss';
  DecimalSeparator := '.';

• Unit test project

Status

I’m not going to develop this code actively since I’m not using it much and everything I needed is done already. But PRs are welcome as well as any tests!

Contributions

If you find this project useful, you can help by adding tests. Test fixtures are located in Test\TestCases.lst, format is described at the beginning of the file. Many modifiers and functions are waiting to be covered.

License

Initial license is dual GPL / MPL 1.0, as mentioned in TemplateEngine.pas, now GPL / MPL 2.0.