This feature is useful when we are writing applications where basically the entire page is dynamically generated but we also want to include snippets of either html or, even more typically, javascript which is almost static, but not quite.
In particular the case with dynamically generated javascript can get syntactically ugly. So instead of generating strings in the erlang code for the javascripts and returning them as {pre_html, Data} tuples, it is more beautiful to keep the javascript functions in separate files and include them with the {ssi ...} return value.
The format of the ssi statement is:
{ssi, File, Delimiter, Bindings}The ssi structure can occur in two radically different places but with identical semantics. It can be a return value in the out/1 function and it is a specially treated return value in ehtml output, here is an example of an odd return value from out/1
[{ssi,"ssi_ex1","%",[{"a","gazzonk"}]},
{ehtml,[{h1,"a Header"},{ssi,"ssi_ex1","%",[{"a","zippo"}]}]}]The file ssi_ex1 contains the following text:
variable a = %a%
And the following ehtml output:
{ehtml,[{ssi,"ssi_ex1","%",[{"a","Godzilla"}]}]}Generates the following output
variable a = Godzilla
And so does the following out/1 function
out(A) -> [{ssi, "ssi_ex1", "%", [{"a", "Godzilla"}]}].So this is the way to do when we want to embed dynamic content deep inside an ehtml structure, but the content isn't representable as ehtml. This is typically the case for dynamically generated javascript as well as dynamically generated java applets.
In the above example, "a" can be seen as the Variable name whereas "Godzilla" can be vieved upon as the value of variable "a". It is also possible to have the variable value be a complete ehtml structure, not just plain ascii strings. Here is an example
out(A) ->
E = {ehtml, {h1, [], "Godzillas baby"}},
[{ssi, "ssi_ex1", "%", [{"a", E}]}].We have a special version of server side includes that we call yssi, yaws server side includes. The syntax for this is:
{yssi, YawsFile}Yssi can only be used as a return value from the out/1 function, never nested into a deep ehtml structure. Yssi, will perform full yaws expansion on the file named YawsFile, i.e (possibly on the fly) compile it, execute it and subsequently inject the generated output from the YawsFile. yssi statements can be arbitrarily deeply recursively nested, that is a .yaws file which has been included through an 'yssi' statement, may itself contain 'yssi' return values in its out/1 function(s)
