LDN - Luminis Developer Network

You know how you can add extra parameters to a channel in the channel creation process ?  Well - that's all well and good if the channel you created cares about those (ie in the JAVA code / .car file etc). 

What if you wanted to ... say - force something, like a special message, a width, assign a style class or something and access that in the XSL (nested-tables.xsl / custom.xsl).

My latest hacking expedition into Luminis 4 forced me to figure this out.

Add A Parameter

Edit a channel, go to the parameter wizard step and add a parameter named message with a value of "LumDev Inside", click Add, click Preview, Click Ok / Done.

Edit NESTED-TABLES.XSL

Now in your nested-tables.xsl - you can add this to your channel template.

    <xsl:variable name='LumDevMessage'>
    <xsl:choose>
        <xsl:when test="parameter[@name='message']/@value">
        <xsl:value-of select="parameter[@name='message']/@value" />
</xsl:when>
        <xsl:otherwise>No Message</xsl:otherwise>
    </xsl:choose>
    </xsl:variable>

At this point you can do whatever you want with it. Render it to the screen with :

<xsl:value-of select="$LumDevMessage" />

Or send it as a parameter to render it in the channel (the actual useful bit)

To do that, add this under the call-template name="custChannel"

<xsl:with-param name="LumDevMessage" select="$LumDevMessage"/>

Edit CUSTOM.XSL

Then in custom.xsl (for your custom skin) find the custChannel template and add this parameter under the others -

<xsl:param name="LumDevMessage"/>

Now you can render it in your channel by simply enterieng {$LumDevMessage} anywhere in the channel code.

More on what you can do with this later... I have some hackin' to do.

-Jon