{"id":60,"date":"2006-07-14T16:59:39","date_gmt":"2006-07-14T15:59:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vislit.com\/blog\/?p=60"},"modified":"2006-07-14T16:59:39","modified_gmt":"2006-07-14T15:59:39","slug":"friday-fill-in-a-smarter-way-to-select-a-service","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vislit.com\/blog\/?p=60","title":{"rendered":"Friday fill-in: A smarter way to select a service"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Tim Anderson writes about a new feature in <em>Visual Liturgy Live <\/em>called &#8216;meta-templates&#8217;: The essence of <em>Visual Liturgy<\/em> is that you select a type of service, and the software populates it with the correct readings along with other material such as the proper preface in the Eucharistic Prayer, or a seasonal introduction to the peace.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Technically, we call the service you select a &#8220;template&#8221;, because it contains the structure and unchanging texts of a service, ready to be customized for a specific occasion.<\/p>\n<p>When the Methodist Church created a version of Visual Liturgy with its own services and texts, it exposed a shortcoming in the service template concept. <em>The Methodist Worship Book<\/em> has variations on the Holy Communion service to be used in different seasons, thus, Holy Communion for Lent and Passiontide, Holy Communion for Christmas and Epiphany, and so on.<\/p>\n<p>It was important that users did not accidentally use one of these services in the &#8220;wrong&#8221; season, so we introduced a way of marking services for specific seasons. If you choose a service out of season, you get a warning.<\/p>\n<p>This was really only a workaround, and with the release of <em>Visual Liturgy Live<\/em> we are adopting a better solution. This better solution is a smart template that in reality represents a number of service templates and will automatically select the correct one for you.<\/p>\n<p>This is important for our inclusion of <em>Common Worship: Daily Prayer<\/em>. It means you can select Prayer during the Day for example, specify the date, and Visual Liturgy will determine which of several Daily Prayer templates is the correct one to use.<\/p>\n<p>The image below shows how a Smart Service is created. It defines a list of templates and the rules by which they are selected. Visual Liturgy will choose the first matching template.<\/p>\n<p>For the user, it is just as easy as selecting a standard service template. The only difference is that a further selection takes place behind the scenes.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<div style=\"text-align: center\"><img decoding=\"async\" id=\"image61\" alt=\"Meta template\" src=\"http:\/\/www.vislit.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2006\/07\/metatemplate.gif\" \/><\/div>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tim Anderson writes about a new feature in Visual Liturgy Live called &#8216;meta-templates&#8217;: The essence of Visual Liturgy is that you select a type of service, and the software populates it with the correct readings along with other material such &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/vislit.com\/blog\/?p=60\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vislit.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vislit.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vislit.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vislit.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vislit.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=60"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vislit.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vislit.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=60"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vislit.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vislit.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}