Tips and Best Practices

Finding out the reasons of errors

Use a log file (see: logFile) as that will contain the full error stack trace. Also, if you are really lost, you may use temporary pp.warning-s as a poor man's debugger: you can see if a certain line in the template is reached, also you can print the current values of variables.

Speeding up processing when you have many files

Some tricks:

• Try to use skipUnchanged setting. For most applications you can safely use it with the static value, and it speeds up things a lot if you have many images or other static files.
• Try to set the quiet setting to true or reallyQuiet, or set echoFormat to terse for the command-line tool. Surprising enough, some terminals scrolls screen slowly, so FMPP has to wait until it can print the next line to the screen.
• Process only the files/directories that actually need reprocessing. You don't have to process the whole source root directory; you can select the set of files and directories that you want to process inside the source root, with the sources setting.

Avoid too much programming logic in templates

FTL (FreeMarker Template Language) is not a general purpose programming language, just a template language. Implementing complex programming logic in it is cumbersome, and defeats the original purpose of templates: to be simple, almost the same as the output. To avoid this, pair BeanShell scripts with the problematic templates, and do the complex calculations in the script file, and then pass the results to the template for displaying. BeanShell is good in calculating data (and in whatever complex algorithms), FTL is good in displaying data. So you use the adequate languages for the subtasks. This can be implemented with the localData setting and its bsh function.

Showing information about something that will be generated further down

For example, you have to show a Table of Contents at the top of the page, but the list of headings is not known until the page generation reaches the bottom of the page. In this case, generate the section that contains the headings first, but capture the output in a variable with an assignment directive (as <#assign var>...</#assign>). Then print the top of the page, and then the captured output. Check <FMPP>/docs/examples/capture to see a working example.