On Sat,  31 Jul  1993 10:04:27  LCL Network  Manager <[log in to unmask]>
said:
 
>I'm assuming  that LSVTMAIL will let  me use templates with  names of my
>choosing as well as the standard names.
 
Of course.
 
>Another  item for  the suggestion  box:  Add more  of the  "boilerplate"
>messages to  the template system. I've  already had occasion to  want to
>change the text  of the "posting acknowledgment" message for  a list and
>can think of reasons for altering the  text of the FUI update message if
>the template system is ever extended to filelists.
 
FUI update messages are not suitable for the template system because most
of the text  is an arbitrary amount of  externally generated information.
That  is, the  message contains  information about  any number  of files.
Conceptually, a template for that message would have to look like:
 
.do &i = 1 to &entries
&text(&i)
.end
 
In order  to be useful,  the templates would have  to implement a  lot of
string manipulation functions  (in addition to the  DO..END construct and
arrays, which aren't there either).
 
A  lot of  "canned"  messages have  the same  problem,  for instance  the
message that tells you that your  posting was rejected is mostly a couple
sentences passed as argument to a  routine that formats a delivery error.
In order to  use the template system, this routine  would have to somehow
pass  the  multi-line  data  for everything  except  the  initial  couple
sentences to LSVTMAIL, and the template would have to extract it somehow.
I'm not saying it can't be done, but  it seems like a lot of work to just
change one sentence at the top of a message. Hmm, come to think about it,
as long as you don't need to  manipulate the text that is being passed it
is not difficult to  do. The caller can write the data to  a DD and I can
easily add  '.DD &DDNAME' to  the template  processor. I'll see  how many
calling sequences would have to be modified to pass template names.
 
  Eric