Nested templates

[g105b]

A nice improvement made in v2 is to be able to insert a templated element back where it originally came from, without having to select its parent in any way. It does this by storing a reference to its parent as it gets extracted from the DOM into the Template object.

Then when you come to add it back to the page, you can do this:

$messageItem = $this->document->getTemplate("message-item");
$messageItem->insertTemplate();

The insert part was crucial - rather than append, it remembers the sibling element too in order to keep its original place.

But the question is, where does (or should) the template named "message-item" get inserted in the following example:

<div data-template="conversation">
    <h1>Title</h1>
    <ul class="messageList">
        <li data-template="message-item">
            Message content
        </li>
    </ul>
</div>

Once the first conversation element has been inserted, should inserting message-item elements go into the original, or the latest added? If the latter, how do we define this?

It might make most sense to do something like the following:

• Templated elements need to remember their ancestors with data-template attributes.
• When being inserted, templated elements need to search for the latest-added data-template ancestor.
• Some clever XPath here?