[REPOST] tiles - smth like addToList?

[Axel Groß <ka...@iaeste.at>]

as I wanted to start a discussion and evaluate how important this is to the
community (~ which didnt work first time; beginning of march)
I repost this as nicolas De Loof just again asked the question which led to this
mail. To the first posting just Adam Hardy answered - that it would be useful.
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Hi people!

Concerning tiles definition and extension of those.
First part-o-mail: concrete problem
Second part-o-mail: a more general approach (beginning of it ;)

  First part:
I see the need for extending the entries of a putList without overriding the
entries in the super definition.
Example:
 <definition name=".head.common" path="htmlHead.jsp">
	<putList name="httpEquiv">
		<item value="pragma" link="no-cache" />
		<item value="cache-control" link="no-cache" />
		<item value="expires" link="0" />
	</putList>
 </definition>

 <definition name=".head.project" extends=".head.common">
	<putList name="httpEquiv">
		<item value="expires" link="1" />
		<item value="description" link="tiles definition extension example" />
	</putList>
 </definition>
so usually this would replace the list in .head.common with the one in
.head.project
desired behaviour would be to just add the new entries ("description") and overwrite those
which are already present ("expires").
Even without the feature to overwrite old values, it would be really nice to have
a tag for that (i.e. <addToList name="httpEquiv">..).
At the moment I use 'specialised' definitions (wrapping those attributes
likely to change in another definition), as I didn't go deep into tiles code until
now. But that just works in some cases.

  Second part:
I think to have this as a general capability would make a lot of sense
(virtually adding+replacing nodes in the definition to those the superdefinition 
at the same place of hierarchy)
Especially if the other config files are going to support extension, too.
So questions arise;
 did anybody do this?
 do others think there's a real need?
 how to judge, which nodes should be overwritten?


thanks for your patience,
Axel


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