Template Toolkit cannot find template files - apache

Question

I have the following .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/views/.*/.*\.html
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/(.*)$ index.pl?controller=$1&action=$2&id=$3
This allows me to forward requests like /Users/show/1 to my main controller. I can also access the template files; at least in my browser i can open the file:
/views/Users/add.html
However when I try to access the file in my controller when i want to render the template, it cannot be found (No such file or directory)
This is the code where i try to render the template:
package UsersController;
use Moose;
use Controllers::ControllerRole;
use Template;
with 'ControllerRole';
has 'example' => (
is => 'rw',
isa => 'Str',
default =>'test',
);
sub show {
my $self = shift;
my $id = $self->{params}->{id};
my $config = {
INTERPOLATE => 1, # expand "$var" in plain text
POST_CHOMP => 1, # cleanup whitespace
PRE_PROCESS => 'header', # prefix each template
EVAL_PERL => 1, # evaluate Perl code blocks
};
my $vars = {
id => $id,
};
my $template = Template->new();
$template->process('views/Users/add.html', $vars) || die "$!";
}
1;
I also tried using absolute or relative paths, but apache complained that this is not allowed
It maybe to helpful to see the file structure of my project:
Update:
If i use chdir i can open the file with Perl's open function, but trying to process the file i still get the error
file error - header: not found
Here is a second iteration of my code:
sub show {
my $self = shift;
chdir '/srv/http/perlweb';
my $id = $self->{params}->{id};
my $config = {
INTERPOLATE => 1, # expand "$var" in plain text
POST_CHOMP => 1, # cleanup whitespace
PRE_PROCESS => 'header', # prefix each template
EVAL_PERL => 1, # evaluate Perl code blocks
ABSOLUTE => 1,
RELATIVE => 1,
};
my $vars = {
id => $id,
planet => 'earth',
captain => 'kirk',
};
open my $fh, "views/Users/add.html" or die "$!"; #this works
close $fh;
my $tt = Template->new($config);
$tt->process('views/Users/add.html', $vars) or die $tt->error(); # this does not work
}

Answer 1

Template Toolkit has the configuration option INCLUDE_PATH that allows you to set up one or more directories in which Template Toolkit looks to find template files. If you set the include_path variable, rather than putting the path in the $tt->process() directive, you can then set up paths in a global config and not hardcode paths in every $tt->process() directive or have to use the ABSOLUTE or RELATIVE options. You can specify numerous directories in the INCLUDE_PATH, and use a subroutine to generate include paths, so you are not limited to keeping all your templates in a single directory.
I would therefore change the config and process directives to the following:
my $config = {
INTERPOLATE => 1, # expand "$var" in plain text
POST_CHOMP => 1, # cleanup whitespace
PRE_PROCESS => 'header', # prefix each template
EVAL_PERL => 1, # evaluate Perl code blocks
INCLUDE_PATH => [ "/srv/http/perlweb/views/Users/",
"/wherever/header/is",
\&my_cool_sub_to_generate_a_path_on_the_fly ]
};
my $tt = Template->new($config);
$tt->process('add.html', $vars) or die $tt->error();
The documentation on INCLUDE_PATH has full information on options for this setting.
Note that the error you are getting is about the file header that is automatically included in each template -- make sure that you have its directory in your INCLUDE_PATH.