Can an External Task determine a DCR's PT?

Has anyone tried to determine a DCR's presentation template via a workflow's external task? I've looked around DevNet for a little while and haven't really found anything that applies, but found some good info, nonetheless. I figure this has to be a fairly straight-forward and common problem, but here are the assumtions:

1. There are possibly many presentation templates per content type, as described in templating.cfg,
2. DCR's only have the standard TeamSite/Templating/DCR/Type extended attribute, let's say nothing else and retrofitting is not an option,
3. The workflow itself has no notion (i.e. job or task variables) that can be used to identify the appropriate presentation template.

Okay, so I might be asking for the impossible, but at least might be a brain teaser. Let me know if you've done this before and what you did to discover the appropriate presentation template.

Thanks,

Dave

Current Environment(s):
(1) TS 6.1 SP2 on W2K3
(2) TS 6.1 SP2 on W2K

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Adam Stoller

Well - you say the DCR only has the standard EA (that's limiting) how about using information contained *within* the DCR? Or using the information with respect to the path to the DCR (assuming you use sub-directories under data/)

Basically there are any number of approaches that can be done if you're willing to provide for them. Limiting yourself with regard to EAs and what the workflow can/can't prompt for, etc. is ... well ... limiting.

We developed a system in which the DCR is created through a workflow -- the workflow prompts for some information which is then encoded into a read-only field within the DCR - an externaltask looks at that information and extracts information out of a configuration file and determines the PT and output path and filename to use for the iwgen and/or iwpt_compile.ipl commands.

The key point is - we designed it - we figured out what data points we needed and where/when/how we could get them - and then put all the pieces together and made it work

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com

Migrateduser

Okay, it's limiting, but my primary goal is to find a solution without retrofitting the existing DCR's or redesigning the directory structure. Further, this was an existing implementation when I got here, so I didn't have an initial hand in putting this thing together.

Since I wrote my initial post, I did a little digging and it seems that there are other EA's being used, so the solution is clear to me now and this makes my initial post unnecessary. I was wondering if others have accomplished this though with minimal accomodations (i.e. additional EA's, etc.)

Dave

Current Environment(s):
(1) TS 6.1 SP2 on W2K3
(2) TS 6.1 SP2 on W2K

chuckles

Are you asking which TPLs are available for a given content type? Can't you parse out templating.cfg? Should be relatively straightforward one you have the category/content type from the DCR's EA.

Migrateduser

Ordinarily, yes... but there could be multiple presentation templates for a given content type.

Dave

Current Environment(s):
(1) TS 6.1 SP2 on W2K3
(2) TS 6.1 SP2 on W2K

jbonifaci

I have done this for several implementations. Having the tpl add an EA to the DCR is a simple, standard solution. I haven't done much with custom templating tags, but you might want to create one and then just add it to all of your tpls.

Adam Stoller

If the desire here is to be able to "brand" the DCR with an EA that indicates which PT to use -- before it's ever been generated from -- then having the PT do the "branding" won't help because you still need to bootstrap the process.

Somewhere, somehow, something or someone needs to provide some piece of information that can be used to determine which of the N PTs available for a given data-type should be used for generating pages from that DCR -- and then, that information (or the resultant information) needs to be attached to the DCR as an EA so that a subseqent process (externaltask, cgitask, custom menu item, etc.) can conjure up all the necessary parameters to generate a page from that DCR without having to prompt the user to specifically choose a PT.

As I said - we did it by augmenting parts of the job instantiaton form and the mechanism within the workflow whereby we create the initial shell of the DCR for the user based on pieces of information that they were prompted for during the course of the workflow. That information is then used to lookup additional information in a configuration file which provides the mappings to allow the workflow process to generate pages from the DCR using the correct PTs and correct output file names.

However - that appears to be too significant a change for his environment so he's looking for something simpler but still effective.

Perhaps a more detailed description of the existing process and identification of the areas in which one could (or can't) modify things would help to provide ideas for an implementation that would stay within the restrictions?

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com

Test_Comments.rptdesign

TEST_COMMENTS.txt