Templates & Keywords

When interacting with the API, templates & keywords can be very powerful, allowing you to utilize Osmek to do most of your data processing. Templates allow you to request data formated how you need it, and keywords allow you to request values in different formats, like the format of a date, or the size of an image.

Templates

When specifying the response format, if you define a template parameter, the value of that parameter will be parsed with the response data from Osmek.

An example template:

The same template parsed by Osmek:

Keywords

A keyword is a word in a template that is meant to be replaced with a value. Keywords in templates are wrapped in hard brackets. Example: [keyword]. Keywords may also be used as the values listed in the vars parameter as described in the Feeds section and the Response Formats.

Keyword Actions

A keyword can consist of multiple parts. The first part will always be the value you want, for example title, or date. The second part can be an action or a formatting value. For instance you can format a date by using date *m/*d/*Y, or request a specific image size by using photo 100x100, or shorten a description to a specific link by using description truncate 400.

Keywords can be broken into 2 or more parts in the following format.

variable_name [action [option1 [option2... ]]]

Actions

Truncate

Any string value can be truncated. If the value is longer than the value you request, it will be shortened, and either an elipsis or what is specified after the length will be appended.

Example: title truncate 20 or description truncate 400 (continued)

Date Format

You can format any date field (such as date, date_added, date_published, date_start, etc.) by passing a format string as the action. The format string is identical to the PHP date format specification found here, however characters should be escaped using an asterick ("*").

Example: date *m/*d/*Y

The following format shortcuts are also supported:

• db: *Y-*m-*d *H:*i:*s
• db_date: *Y-*m-*d
• db_time: *H:*i:*s
• timestamp: (unix timestamp)
• time: *g:*i *A

Example: date db

Photos

The action for a photo should be the size of photo you want. This can either be a size extension as defined in your section settings (like "l" or "sq") or an explicit size, such as 100x100. More on photo sizing in the photos server section

After the photo size you can specify what kind of value you want. Available values are url, html, width, height, title, caption, orig_name, image_type.

Examples:
photo large url will give you a url for the image
photo 100x100x1 html will give you html for the image

Files

Available actions for file fieds are: url (default), download_url, orig_name, filesize, date, ext, author.

Active

You can use the action parameter on the "active" variable to perform a ternary expression on the value

Example: active yes|no (If active == true, this value will not be "yes", otherwise "no").

Pagination

If you use the "Insert page break" button in your description fields, you can request certain pages from your text using the "page" action. (Note: this only works on the description variable).

Examples:
description page:1
description page:2
... and so on.

Utilizing arrays in templates

When accessing feeds, the response data from Osmek starts as a multidimensional array. You can utilize this to make a loop

Example template with loop: