Rendering of @Notes

[Steve Smith]

Let's get this party started..

We recently introduced a simple version of custom rendering for the
@Notes annotation. Some users liked it, some wanted more advanced
rendering e.g. automatically rendering hyperlinks inside the detailed
text of a @Notes. Is this something we want to support, or is essay-
writing in @Notes an exceptional case?

S

[Matt Savage]

Just trying it on for size: for maximum freedom, we could add @Notes(file="ThisTestNotes.html")

This does assume the output rendering is html, which doesn't seem super-cool. Just throwing it out there to see if it prompts any better ideas.

[Daniel Worthington-Bodart]

I don't want to have a special case for including files as again this can be done just with custom renderers. (In fact Halo did this for a bit when the testers wanted to include loads of test data). 

I've started the refactor towards supporting different templates so that I can support wiki formatting as an output (I'm going to use yatspec to document all my projects and then publish to google code). But I also want to support wiki formats in Notes via a custom renderer so that people can do what ever they want.

On another but related note, Alex worked out a very simple way for StringTemplate to support predicates when matching renderers so I'm finally going to pull out the ST stuff from Yatspec and UtterlyIdle and create a new bad boy that does everything we need. It will have the following features:

• Url based template loading (from UIdle)
• Default renderers (from Yatspec)
• Predicates for renderers (new)
• A new model based on Records (well I'll give it a try at least)

I might create a new interface so that if my alternative implementation works in the future we can switch over pretty easy.

D

[Matt Savage]

Nice.