Snippets

A snippet is a piece of text that is to be reused in more than one page object. In the page object, you use the name of the snippet, and RubyFrontier substitutes the text.

A snippet is a tool. Thus, to make a snippet, simply place a .txt file in a #tools folder. The simple name of the file is the name of the snippet. The contents of the .txt file is the text you want substituted into your pages.

Early in the rendering process, as the page table is constructed, when RubyFrontier discovers a .txt file in a #tools folder, it creates a corresponding entry in the page table’s "snippets" hash. The key is the simple name of the snippet file; the value is the text of the snippet (the contents of the snippet file).

To use a snippet in a page object, enclose its name in double square brackets, like [[this]]. RubyFrontier, at the appropriate moment during rendering, notices this, looks up the name in the "snippets" hash, and substitutes the value. If this lookup fails because the name is not the name of a known snippet, there is no error and no substitution takes place (so there should be no problem with using double square brackets for other purposes).

NOTE for Frontier users: The glossary mechanism in Frontier suffered from some problems: it was overloaded, and glossary resolution took place too late in the page rendering process for many purposes. In RubyFrontier, therefore, the Frontier glossary mechanism is split into three pieces:

• the snippets mechanism, for simple text substitution

• the autoglossary mechanism, for substitution of automatically maintained relative URLs within the site;

• and the glossary mechanism, for substitution of manually maintained absolute URLs.