Newbie questions

["Schlierf, Stephan" <St...@VSA.de>]

Hello,

I'm more or less a newbie to Forrest (not only Forrest, I acknowledge my
ignorance ;-) - so, please don't be bored with a few questions I would like
to ask.
1) I would like to have a quite flexible document structure; let me give an
example for it:
Presume we have five seperate documents, say A, B, C, D, E. Now I would like
to do the following:
Besides their own own text, document A should include the documents B and D;
document B should include document C and document D should include document
E.
Transformed to HTML, these include-associations should be represented as
links.
Transformed to PDF, they should appear according to the sequence they appear
in the respective documents.
Is something like this already supported by Forrest ?
Maybe with the XInclude capability in version 0.5?
Does anybody else face the same problem and maybe has already a solution for
it?
When will version 0.5 be available (I mean, not via cvs)?

2) A couple of days ago I posted a message concerning the date and time in
the copyright line (I use the Forrest skin). As far as I can see now, date
and time are correct if you generate a static HTML-website (by using
"forrest site"). But if you use the "forrest webapp" command, date and time
are set to January, 1st, 1970. BTW, no changes were made in the respective
"footer"-section in the site2xhtml.xsl document.
Is this a know bug, an unexpected feature or just caused by my ignorance
concerning doing things right ?
Is there a way to tell Forrest that the "Last modified" date reflects the
date the specific site was modified so that one can have documents with
different timestamps in a way they were actually modified?

Thank you very much for your help - and thank you very much for Forrest :-)

Stephan

Re: Newbie questions

[Jeff Turner <je...@apache.org>]

On Fri, Mar 21, 2003 at 11:21:13AM +0100, Schlierf, Stephan wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm more or less a newbie to Forrest (not only Forrest, I acknowledge my
> ignorance ;-) - so, please don't be bored with a few questions I would like
> to ask.
> 1) I would like to have a quite flexible document structure; let me give an
> example for it:
> Presume we have five seperate documents, say A, B, C, D, E. Now I would like
> to do the following:
> Besides their own own text, document A should include the documents B and D;
> document B should include document C and document D should include document
> E.
> Transformed to HTML, these include-associations should be represented as
> links.
> Transformed to PDF, they should appear according to the sequence they appear
> in the respective documents.
> Is something like this already supported by Forrest ?

Sure - Cocoon is ideal for this kind of thing.  Just involves figuring
out the pipelines and writing some XSLTs.

> Maybe with the XInclude capability in version 0.5?

In the PDF pipeline, yes.  Perhaps you could have a special inclusion
tag:

<my:include href="B.xml"/>

In the HTML pipeline, it gets translated to <a href="B.html">, and in the
PDF, to <xi:include href="B.xml"/>

> Does anybody else face the same problem and maybe has already a solution for
> it?
> When will version 0.5 be available (I mean, not via cvs)?

Quite a while yet.  Can you not access CVS?  Perhaps we should start
making nightly downloads available.

> 2) A couple of days ago I posted a message concerning the date and time in
> the copyright line (I use the Forrest skin). As far as I can see now, date
> and time are correct if you generate a static HTML-website (by using
> "forrest site"). But if you use the "forrest webapp" command, date and time
> are set to January, 1st, 1970. BTW, no changes were made in the respective
> "footer"-section in the site2xhtml.xsl document.
> Is this a know bug, an unexpected feature or just caused by my ignorance
> concerning doing things right ?

It's more of a limitation than a bug.  The date is generated with
Javascript from the file timestamp.  It ought to be generated as static
text when the page is created.  Probably the date inputmodule passing in
some text to the site2xhtml.xsl stylesheet would do the trick.

> Is there a way to tell Forrest that the "Last modified" date reflects the
> date the specific site was modified so that one can have documents with
> different timestamps in a way they were actually modified?

Do you mean, last edited?  When someone last modified the XML?  Don't
think so.. all Forrest knows is when the HTML was generated.

--Jeff

> 
> Stephan