More theme subsection code encapsulation, and zone template

Another thing that would be really cool (for design, and for other modules) is that your theming functions overlapping could implement the decorator pattern, this would implies that the layout rendering triggers each zone rendering, which themselves triggers each reference rendering.

By cascading theming functions this fashion, modules would be able to "mark" some layout being rendering and access layout and node information during the full process, keeping the context in which each element is being rendering.

This information might not be usefull for you, but would be for a lot of modules and even themes themselves.

In my case, I need it, and something is wrong with your actual way of rendering things for me, is that those context information is really missing, and references are being redered before zones, which actually breaks my container/items introspection in order to put the right classes and stuff for js composite zones and references detection.

EDIT: I'm currently working on it, patching the full rendering algorithm in order to reduce some arrays iterations, passing some of them as references instead of array recopy (even if PHP does some optimizations arround it, they are actually not always accurate). I'll also implement the decorator pattern in the theme process. The only difficulty here is to keep it backward compatible.

RE-EDIT: You are also currently using the drupal_render() function with its facilities such as children_element() and such. In most case this could be avoided by taking a more pragmatic approach without wiping out totally the current design.

Ok, thanks in advance for your time. I have some to spare for your module, please use it:)

This patch is more like a proof of concept than real clean code. In fact I'm trying to rewrite this piece of code and don't find a clean solution to do whatever I need to do. Still trying to find a clean pattern.

And here is another (which I think is better) patch. Did this because I needed it. It might need some more work, but it works as expected in my environment.

Last one, this is one is better, I cleaned up theme functions signatures to ensure that no useless arguments are passed, this also simplify a bit their usage.

It uses an algorithm which looks like the decorator pattern, each layer of rendering is responsible for running the lower ones, and it works pretty flawlessly.

I'm currently using it in the DND module I'm working on.

Actually I may have some modifications to do. And because I'm the only one using it, I also think it really needs more testing! Unit tests should be done to ensure it works properly.

Hi, here is a new patch. I did some really basic unit testing using simpletests, it far from being complete, but that's a start. Doing these tests I was able to spot *a lot* of PHP warning on non setted variables, that I fixed all among your code.

Here is the complete patch, including:

• The exact same patch as upper, plus:
• The basic unit testing code;
• isset() and empty() more tests, all among the code to avoid PHP warnings;
• simple patch (add a foo region on blocks) in block module integration to avoid core block rendering function from outputing PHP warnings;
• Some caching using cache_get() and cache_set() in order to achieve better performances on some parts of the code.

Have fun testing & reviewing (this should not be that hard).

Note: IMHO, this patch is ready for me (at least for beta releasing). Still convince that it needs some community testing since I have a really specific use case of your module.

Still doing some progress on the patch. I added a variable so the site admin can choose weither or not composite should display the recursion error when detected. I added this as a checkbox in a new administration page under admin/settings/composite.

Everything else is exactly the same as the forth (-3, last one) patch I submitted.

Sorry, I did not answer for a long time, I will test it as soon as I can, expect an answer for the next days.

Hi, I did not answer for a long time (bis). I'm actualy testing your patche right NOW! :)

@bengtan
I'm currently using your patch, and since the last 10 minutes (did some functional tests arround) it seems to be working fine.

I'm convinced that it needs further testing, but until now, this patch is OK for me.

Ok, nice! I'm still convinced it needs further testing (at least all possible CRUD tests using simpletests) before it gets released. I'll see if I have some time to do it.