Thursday, December 23, 2010

Images inheritance in Plack based apps

My plan for Nblog is to let users customize it by subclassing and overloading, in the screencast I showed how to do that with controllers and templates, in the latest revision of Nblog I added the possibility of overloading images. There are Plack components for all parts of this task - but I had a bit of struggle with getting the settings right. Maybe the following code snippet will spare similar time waste for someone?



Some explanations: psgi_callback is the method in WebNano that constructs the anonymous subroutine required by the PSGI standard and here I use the around Moose method modifier for it to add some additional processing there. static_roots returns a list of directories where to search for the static files - this is our search path - the first file found in these directories is served. In the base class this list contains only 'static' - if you want to overload the static files in a subclass you need to add your directories before this one, in my example subclass config I have:

static_root => [ 'static', '../Nblog/static' ]

(these are relative paths). See also Plack::App::Cascade. All of this would be a bit easier to assemble if the Plack components logged some debug info to STDOUT, like what you can find in the standard Apache logs about files not found, when run in development environment. I am volunteering to write a patch if there is a green light from the core devs.

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