Difference between revisions of "Talk:Call extension"

Revision as of 15:14, 10 September 2007

When installing the extension the special page comes up with a new template.

What do I have to write into that template?

I don´t understand. Which special page? And please sign messages you leave here . Gero 00:00, 10 September 2007 (CEST)

What I mean is the following:

I copied the extension into the extension directory and added the include statement into the LocalSettings.php.

When done there is a new special page with the name Call. Below that page a (to me) cryptic link to a template page appears. When following that link it brings me to the dedicated template page and that is where I am lost.

Albert Cremer 10 September 2007

Oh, I see. The Call Special Page does not do anything but call another page which is given to it as an argument. So if you call it directly without an argument you will see nothing but a link to itself (which is not a real hyperlink because mediawiki suppresses self references of pages). I will add a text explaining this to the next release. It is not a defect and should not bother you. The value of the Call extension comes when you use it to invoke an arbitrary page of your wiki. You put the page name (plus its namespace) behind "Call/". And then you can add parameters (as a comma separated list).

The trick is that thus you can create wiki links to a page and pass parameters at the same time.

A link to the current page would normally look like this

This is a link to Talk:Call extension

You could make the same link with

This is a link to Special:Call/Talk:Call extension using the Call mechanism.

The only difference you will notice is that you get a special page instead of a normal page when clicking on the link. But the contents is the same.

Now we assume that our page has some code which acts upon a parameter called What. Let us assume it outputs a text line if "What" is not empty.

If we use a link to this page where we call it with a value for 'What' the page will behave differently. Try and press the following link:

This is a link to Special:Call/Talk:Call extension,What=Something Wonderful using the Call mechanism.

The whole thing is really useful to build pages which have a state concept and implement different views. See the DPL GUI for a useful application of 'Call'. 'Call' supports a design pattern which is as old as typical MainFrame Transaction Monitoring Systems like CICS are.

Thank you very much. This really helps! Albert Cremer 10 September 2007