Import confusion

[Kristian Ovaska]

David Bolen <db3l at fitlinxx.com>:
>As long as you realize the potential maintenance "expense" of this
>approach as your code will no longer clearly identify where such
>objects came from

We're talking about small scripts here, so the expense is quite small.
You could say they are executed in a limited environment, or
"sandbox". Runtime constants and functions are clearly documented. One
is supposed to be able to use them without any knowledge of the
internal structure of my program.

>But we could also just agree to disagree on the "handiness" of
>referencing an imported object including the module name.  It does
>help your original issue though since everything would reference the
>same object in the loaded constant module.

I solved the original problem this way:

	def execCode(self, code, outFile):
		if not code:
			return

		import runtime
		runtime._setRuntime(self, outFile)
		for name in dir(runtime):
			if name[0]!='_':
				exec '%s = runtime.%s' % (name, name)

		sys.stdout = outFile
		exec 'pass'
		exec code+'\n'
		sys.stdout = sys.__stdout__

Example script could be:

if len(pages)>1:
    print '<!-- Navigation bar -->'
    print '<table class="navbar">'
    print '<tr>'
    columns = len(pages)
    for p in pages:
        print '<td width="'+str(100/columns)+'%"',
        if p.file==page.file:
            print 'class="active"',
        print '><a href="'+p.file+'">'+p.title+'</a></td>'
    print '</table>'
    print '<hr>\\n'

This prints a navigation bar for a "flat" HTML page structure. page is
current page and pages is the list of all pages. The naming of
constants could be better, I haven't given it much thought.

-- 
Kristian Ovaska <kristian.ovaska at helsinki.fi>