What's your opinion about replacing links with form buttons?
In general I'm in agreement with you. If the action has no side effects (this is not the same as being non-destructive; many actions may be non-destructive but nevertheless have important side affects [though all destructive actions are necessarily side affects]) it should be in an <a> tag. If the action has side effects, it should be in a 'post' method form. I would still object to the 'URL' variable for the following reasons: 1. When I am looking at the template and I see a link, I want to know where that link goes to. The 'url' variable hides this important piece of information from the template designer. 2. As a 'general' rule (you can always find exceptions) the only things which should be substituted into a template are those things which are dynamic and may change. The url is not, only its parameters are. I would want a more important reason than the clutteredness of the template to override this principle (there may be one, but I haven't heard it). 3. If a side-affect is later added to the action, the developer doesn't have to be bothered with changing things up to switch the code, he can pawn that off on the template designer. (Granted they may be one and the same, but the separation of duties is a Good Thing(tm) IMO).
That's the goal of everybody here :-) Hope you don't think I want to break anything. I want to improve based on my ideas and experience. If I say mistakes sometimes, no problem for recognizing it!
Oh I hope you didn't think I was digging at you. I've been very pleased (not that my pleasedness or not matters) with most of your suggestions and improvements. I really did intend the above as a) a compliment to the whole koha team and b) an encouragement to keep doing what you're doing (again to the whole koha team). I certainly didn't intend to imply that you would try to make it less (though I was implying that following my suggestion was the path of more robustness in this particular case) :). I'm going to go ahead and combine your emails and respond to your other one here as well.
You don't know in advance the number of level. It can be 2 or 10. Is that feasible in a template engine? (not with simple template engine in my opinion). Personnaly, I resigned and coded it into PHP and gave an HTML string to the template. I'm not sure this case happens in Koha, but I think it's to easy to say "no HTML in script".
Robert, you're opinion? (a solution for my problem?)
Good criticism and question. I should have said "no HTML in script unless it is unfeasable (not merely difficult or cumbersome) to accomplish in the template". Always there are exceptions to every rule of course. The solution to your particular problem can be achieved in any template system which supports recursive includes with passed variables (PHP's Smarty and Perl's Template Toolkit can both do so; I'm not sure about HTML::Template or other templating options). I'm also not sure how that would play with the translation stuff going on in koha. Your problem can also be solved by transforming the problem from a recursive one to an iterative one, but I've always had trouble with that (I can do it if I have to but I'd rather use recursion unless performance is a real problem). Thanks for the interesting discussion. Robert