This section will only cover a few basic aspects of writing mason templates, specially those details related to eBox. If you need complete documentation about a certain aspect you should check the mason documentation or the mason book. Additional examples can be found in Chapter 8.

The first thing your mason template will have is the declarations of the arguments it expects. Just write the name of the variables, one per line and you are done. Arguments declared as arrays in the template will be passed as array references by your CGI.

In our example we are going to give the template an array with names, and the template will say hello to each one of them separately. We use an empty array as a default value for the variable, although default values are optional. If none is given and you don't pass that argument to the template an exception will be thrown.

<%args>
	@people => ()
</%args>

The next thing is the initialization section, in this section we can write regular perl code. It is optional and most of the times not needed. However all eBox templates have one, because there is always the need to have i18n, so we import EBox::Gettext:

<%init>
use EBox::Gettext;
</%init>

Now we can go on and write the body of the template. The idea is to just write HTML and use a couple of syntactic features to insert perl code wherever we need. First, we'll learn how to do control flow. All lines that start with a % are interpreted as perl code.

<ul>
% foreach my $person (@people) {
	<li>Hello</li>
% }
</ul>

We want to print the name of a person in each list item. Embedding perl expressions in the special tags <% %> prints the value of the expression in the output of the template. We are going to use this feature to print the name of the person and translate the "Hello" string (internationalization is explained in Section 2.4).

<ul>
% foreach my $person (@people) {
	<li><% __('Hello') %> <% $person %></li>
% }
</ul>

The ebox m4 macro exports the installation path for mason templates as TEMPLATESPATH, so you should install them under that directory, possibly creating a subdirectory for your module. Whenever you need to reference a template in your code, you can just use a path relative to TEMPLATESPATH. Following our example, will use a subdirectory named hello for our templates, and place a template called world.mas in it.

<div class='class-name'>
	Some message.
</div>

<table class='dataTable'>
	<caption><% __('Object List') %></caption>
	<thead>
		<tr>
			<th class='tleft'><% __('Name') %></th>
			<th class='thOptions'><% __('Action') %></th>
		</tr>
	</thead>
	<tbody>
		<tr>
			<td></td>
			<td class='tcenter'>
				<a href='Del?objectname=<% $obj->{'name'} %>'>
						<img src='/data/images/delete.gif'
						     title="<% __('Delete') %>"
						     alt="<% __('Delete') %>"/>
				</a>
			</td>
		</tr>
	</tbody>
</table>

<table class='formTable'>
	<tr>
		<td class='tright'>
			<span class='ftitle'><% __('Name') %>:</span>	
		</td>
		<td>
			<input class='inputText' type='text' name='name' />
		</td>
	</tr>
	<tr>
		<td></td>
		<td>
			<input class='inputButton' type='submit' />
		</td>
	</tr>
</table>