[Templates] Default values for Textarea field

[Josh Rosenbaum]

Peter Sørensen wrote:
> Thanks for taking you time to reply.
> 
> I sure have read the DOCS and different issues concerning the textarea field.
> You can't assign a "value" like you suggest. You have to do something like:
> 
> <td><textarea name= [% field.subscribers.name] rows=.... cols=...>
> 	[% - FOREACH subscriber IN subscriber_members -%]
> 		[%- subscriber -%]
> 	[% END -%]
> </textarea>
> 
> so I found a solution. But it is not an easy task to deal with the textarea
> field through TT. This because all the extra NL give problems.

NOTE: I don't use Catalyst or FormBuilder. So this may have 0 relevance here, but I think I understand what you guys are talking about.

What about doing this instead for those complicated cases:
------------------------------------------
[% textarea_default = BLOCK %]
	[% - FOREACH subscriber IN subscriber_members -%]
		[%- subscriber -%]
	[% END -%]
[% END %]
<textarea name= [% field.subscribers.name] rows=.... cols=...>[% field.subscribers.field(value => textarea_default) %]</textarea>
------------------------------------------

For this simple case, I would of course use the join vmethod instead, though.
------------------------------------------
<textarea name= [% field.subscribers.name] rows=.... cols=...>[% field.subscribers.field(value => subscriber_members.join('')) %]</textarea>
------------------------------------------

One thing that could be bad is that you always have to process the default value. Maybe you could hack in a perl subroutine to pass to field.subscribers.field(value => mysub('textarea_default_block')) that would accept the name of a block to process if necessary. (This would require that the value param accepts subroutines of course.)

Roughly mysub would look like:
sub mysub{
  my ($block_name) = @_;
  return sub{
    return $tt->context->process($block_name)
  }
}

Just throwing ideas out there for you. They may need refinement.

-- Josh