Template Toolkit virtual methods with less mess

Template Toolkit has a very cool feature called Virtual Methods. It provide methods on native Perl5 data types.

An example is this (In TT syntax):

[% listy = [ 47, -47, 42, -55, 4, -24 ] %]
[% listy.size %]
[% listy.join(', ') %]

Often its called autoboxing. Well TT allows you to define your own. The details are available in the TT VMethod Manual. In that page there is a TODO about a method called define_vmethod.

Since I like to use TT from CGI::Application and I don't like to actually see its guts. I choose to find a way to add a vmethod without the unpretty $Template::Stash::LIST_OPS->{} syntax. I think that is quite unfriendly to TT noobs like most of my coworkers.

I found that define_vmethod is available off the TT Context object. This is available with $tt->context or in my case off plugin TT object in CGI App $self->tt_obj->context.

The parameters are context->define_vmethod( $type, $name, \&implementation )

• $type - data type, 'scalar', 'list', 'array' or 'hash'
  
• $name - the name for you method 'abs', 'smash', 'love'
• \&implementation - sub reference that does the method
  

Here is my case, where I really wanted to do:
[% IF indexes.$rate.value.abs > 10 %]

Here is the implementation:

## inside my CGI::App run mode
sub qa {
my $self = shift; ## grab cgi::app object

$self->tt_obj->context->define_vmethod( 'scalar', 'abs',
 sub { return abs( shift ) } );
....
}

The parameters passed to the sub reference depend upon the datatype. But after the data type value then additional parameters are passed, so I could have added parameters to the abs call. E.g.

[% indexes.$name.value.abs(10) %]

In that case the parameters would have been: my @_ = ( $list_value, 10 );

First parameter for each type:

• scalar - value
  
• list||array - reference to list
• hash - reference to hash

In another post, I'll write an example of either or both of those.