Page generation

Web pages within a site generally follow a specific pattern. For example, all pages might have a navigation bar on the top, a submenu on the left, the main content in the middle and legal or contact information at the bottom. For the most part, the top and bottom areas might be almost the same or with little variation across all pages with only the main content being specific to a page.

Moreover, the main content itself often follows some boilerplate format, for example shopping cart where only the line items differ between page views. In such cases, the page needs to be constructed from a combination of static content and data dynamically retrieved from some source such as a database.

Woof! provides mechanisms to simplify implementation of web pages that follow the above pattern. Conceptually, Woof! constructs a Web page from a page layout containing page sections, each identified by a name corresponding to the various areas within the page. The page layout determines the positioning of the various sections, such as the header, the main content, the navigation bar etc. The page sections themselves contain the actual content.

Both layouts and sections are rendered using templates that combine static content and HTML markup with Tcl code. This allows very flexible structures for both.

In addition, Woof! uses a specific search algorithm for locating both layouts and sections that allows easy sharing and inheritance of templates between controllers and actions as well as specialization based on factors such as the client's preferred language.

This chapter describes this whole page generation process.