I'm not entirely sure what you mean in the first paragraph, so I don't have much to add there. Personally, I like having access to objects in the templates. In terms of CRUD, it seems to make writing interfaces much easier and cleaner. I suppose you could say that more code ends up in the template, but you could also say that more of the presentation ends up in the template as well I think. I suppose that's a debateable point. As for borrower.something vs borrower->something, I don't know if it matters if it looks like a method or a column. It would be quick enough to find out if it mattered. I'm not sure what you mean by the wrapper approach exactly, but personally I think we could do with fewer wrappers and just try to keep things as simple as possible. Re-reading your example, do you mean that you'd pass a branch code to the template and then use Branches.GetName from the Branches plugin to replace that with the branch name? In theory, it would be nice if you could do item.branchcode.branchname (where branchcode is a foreign key and using the branchname method causes the Item object to fetch the corresponding Branch object), which is something that I recall Jonathan doing perhaps in some of the templates? Of course, I think using the plugin approach, you might be able to add more multilingual support for other things. For instance. item.itype would retrieve "BOOK". Item.itype.item_description would be "Book", but if you used ItemTypes.GetName (or something like that), you could possibly choose a translated template instead of just the value from the database. Since most of my work is in English, I'll defer to others regarding translations in templates. David Cook Systems Librarian Prosentient Systems 72/330 Wattle St Ultimo, NSW 2007 Australia Office: 02 9212 0899 Direct: 02 8005 0595 From: koha-devel-bounces@lists.koha-community.org [mailto:koha-devel-bounces@lists.koha-community.org] On Behalf Of Marcel de Rooy Sent: Thursday, 15 September 2016 9:03 PM To: koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org Subject: [Koha-devel] [Koha::Object] Related records and calling methods from templates Hi devs, I am seeing more Koha objects that include methods for related records like Koha::Patron, sub image referring to Koha::Patron::Images. As a second example, on bug 14610 (article requests), a biblio, item, branch and borrower method is added to Koha::ArticleRequest. Obviously, they all follow the same pattern. Could we generalize that, and keep our code cleaner? And do we always need the full Koha object? For use in a template we may need only a few columns. We start passing these objects to the templates now too, making it possible to call methods from the template. It is possible, but do we really want that? More code ends up in the template, maybe harder to find since you now use borrower.method instead of borrower->method etc. Secondly, reading borrower.something might not immediately tell you that something is a method instead of a column. In other cases we have added a sort of wrapper like Branches.GetName from the Branches plugin. I am interested to know if we want to enforce this wrapper approach for instance, or just continue on the current road. Thx, Marcel