Templates: various questions not worth their own thread

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by chaley

I'm not sure what you are asking.

If you are asking if it would be faster to use field_list_count() instead of $$#timesread then the answer is yes. In the best case where $$#timesread has already been evaluated for the book then the performance improvement will be around 2 times. If $$#timesread hasn't yet been evaluated for the book then the performance improvement is at least 10 times.

If you are using $#timesread (not raw_field()) then the performance improvement of using field_list_count() directly is probably 10 to 100 times.

Yes, specifically line three here:

program:
	status = readstatus();
	times = field_list_count('#datesread');
	readgoal = strcat('readinggoal:', format_date(today(), 'yyyy')) in $#admintags;

	switch_if(
		status=='read', 'Read',
		status=='didnotfinish', 'Did Not Finish',
		status=='currentlyreading', 
			if times >#0 then 'Currently Rereading' 
			else 'Currently Reading' fi,
		status=='toberead', 'To Be Read',
		status=='unread', 
			if readgoal && $$#lastread != 'None' then 'To Be Read' 
			elif readgoal then 'Backlog' 
			else 'Unread' fi,
		''
	)

When #timesread column used to be an integer, I used that for 'times.' Now that it's a composite, I switched to using field_list_count() directly.

I just realized I could probably speed up this template a nudge by turning those nested if-thens into switch_ifs.