SSI & Spry

Question

Hi all,
I have a table with a list of items in it, which is fully
generated by Spry from an XML dataset. Part of the table includes
an icon to the PDF version of a document. This document changes
name for each row (named after the {id}), but not all rows have a
PDF available at any given time.
When the table is shown, I want to have a PDF icon to those
files that have a matching PDF file available, and a greyed out
icon for those that don't.
My original plan was to call a small cgi script via SSI which
passes the {id} from the dataset to the script, which then checked
if a matching PDF exists, and returns the correct icon depending on
the results. In theory this works great, but when I call the cgi
using pdfcheck.cgi?id={id} and then print the $id variable that the
cgi received to STDERR, its actually being passed {id} and not the
value of {id} (eg. CAD00002) as I was expecting.
I am basically doing in a table:
<tbody spry:repeatchildren="ds">
<tr>
<td><!--include
virtual="/cgi-bin/pdfcheck.cgi?id={id}"--></td>
<td>......</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
and pdfcheck.cgi will return <img src="pdf.png"> or
<img src="pdfoff.png"> depending on the result of the file
check ... or would if it wasnt always checking for "{id}.pdf" which
obviously doesn't exist :)
Any ideas ?
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Thinking about it, this is never gonna work as the SSI is
executed to early anyway I believe.
I ended up using SSI to call a cgi script to generate a new
xml file based on the contents of the PDF directory, which I then
load into the page and during the onPostLoad observer function I
set the image depending on if there is a match between the two
datasets. Seems to work quite well and isn't too slow, although
time will tell as more items are added to the tables :)
Any other suggestions are welcome though, all knowledge is
good knowledge!