Layout slots don't work with cx-url

[siosphere]

I'm not sure if this was the intended use-case. But if I have a layout that defines slot, and my app returns something like: <div cx-url="/some/other/place"></div> And /some/other/place returns the url with the cx-use-slots, I would expect it to be replaced. This doesn't happen though.

I've tried a few different ways. I've tried adding the cx-url on the cx-use-slot: <div cx-use-slot="siosphere:body" cx-url="/some/place/">Didn't work</div>

I got it to somewhat work when I nested the cx-url under the cx-use-slot but that doesn't quite do the use case I'm looking for.

Is there a different approach I should be doing? Essentially I want several fragment renderers to be able to write to the same slots (which the documentation says should be possible) but any cx-url that returns cx-use-slots are just completely ignored. I verified that cx-parse-me: true headers are being returned at all appropriate stages.

[sithmel]

To get this we should change the current implementation of the layout feature. This is what happens now:

• we get the page
• we extract the slots from the page (cx-use-slot) and put the strings on a dictionary
• we get the layout
• we parse the layout
  • during the parsing (parxer) cx-define-slot will fill the slot (using the dictionary) https://github.com/tes/parxer/blob/master/lib/plugins/define-slot.js#L20
  • and run parse on it https://github.com/tes/compoxure/blob/master/src/middleware/htmlparser.js#L111

We could change the process like this:

• we get the page
• we parse the page
• we extract the slots from the page (cx-use-slot) and put the (already parsed) strings on a dictionary
• we get the layout
• we parse the layout
  • during the parsing (parxer) cx-define-slot will fill the slot (using the dictionary) https://github.com/tes/parxer/blob/master/lib/plugins/define-slot.js#L20
  • and we won't run parse on it

[sithmel]

We have attempted to fix the problem with the branch parse-order-fix. We followed the order explained in the comment above. We realised that is not going to work as expected: There are many compoxure behaviours that depends on the parsing order, and parsing the entire page BEFORE the layout creates many issues. For example it changes the order of cx-url in relation with cx-bundle and therefore some bundle can't resolve its url. The feature that removes duplicated bundles/libraries is impacted too.

We are thinking to close as "won't do" but we can leave it open in case we have some idea in the next weeks.