Roll20 uses cookies to improve your experience on our site. Cookies enable you to enjoy certain features, social sharing functionality, and tailor message and display ads to your interests on our site and others. They also help us understand how our site is being used. By continuing to use our site, you consent to our use of cookies. Update your cookie preferences .
×
Create a free account

Nested Queries without HTML substitutions - possible approach

Score + 4
Nested Queries were temporarily fixed on  October 20, 2021 , but then it was rolled back the next day (as it caused other problems) but it was a hopeful moment!  It seemed to work well from what I remember. The Roll20 Team explained in today's AMA that the fix broke a lot of macros that were already in use in games, and that it made the fix too complex to adjust to already existing macros. Totally understandable. Would it be possible to have a game setting for an 'Experimental' Query parser to be used, similar to the 'Experimental' API server? That way a game could 'opt in' to using a Query Parser that allows nested queries to work without HTML substitutions.  Older games with existing macros would not be affected, but newly created games would have the option to incorporate a more intuitive query building structure.
I wasn't experimenting with queries at the time that fix was implemented, but I suspect the reason it broke existing macros is because as is, queries contain a step in the order of operations in which html entities are parsed out - if this fix nixed that step, that would break any existing macros that had that encoding built in them to account for queries. So, if the fix was implemented in such a way that the html entities were still parsed once, but you wouldn't need to encode queries to make them work nested, then you could have both maintained compatibility with old macros, and easier nested queries in the future. Though it could become a slightly confusing legacy quirk, as you'd need to doubly encode some stuff for seemingly no reason.