I guess this is a continuation of the discussion in the thread
"uilabels and screenlet widget", and is related somewhat to part of
the stuff in issue OFBIZ-1648.
The general goal of the widgets is simple: no platform specific
artifacts. Unfortunately this isn't entirely possible, which is why we
have a very big and ugly "platform-specific" tag to delineate things
that are not generic and provide for the possible of having
alternative platform things specified together so that when rendering
for a different target the appropriate option can be selected.
As far as that applies to this topic, I'd say the best approach is to
never have any element or attribute called "dojo" or "ajax" or "rico"
or anything. In the dojo attribute for the container elements, I'm not
sure what you'd propose to put in it, ie the "some Dojo data", but in
general I'd prefer to never have anything that is so dependent on a
particular underlying technology, the widget artifacts gain efficiency
by their focus on different effects, with the underlying software
taking care of the "causes", or rather how the effects are brought
about.
In other words while we wouldn't want elements that have anything to
do with "dojo" or "openrico" we would want elements to describe the
effects from those libraries we'd like to have available through the
widget, and the most appropriate is probably the Form Widget with
different form and field types (though some would certainly go
elsewhere and are not form related).
Examples of that would be a new form type like "live-grid" or a new
form field type like "live-combobox" (or "dynamic-combobox" or "server-
side-combobox" or something). If we add elements like that then it
doesn't matter which AJAX library we use underneath and generate HTML/
etc for, and we can change libraries without requiring any change to
the higher level artifacts, like the form definitions.
-David
On Feb 16, 2008, at 1:34 PM, Adrian Crum wrote:
In order to accommodate 3rd party rendering libraries (Ajax, Dojo,
etc) in the screen widgets, we need to discuss how that support will
appear in the screen widget XML files.
I'll start things off with a suggestion I made in another thread.
Everyone is welcome to join in and offer their ideas. When we reach
an agreement, we can submit the results to Jira and begin building
it out.
I was thinking we could simply extend the existing widgets with
additional attributes. The new attributes would pass 3rd party
specific data to the rendering classes. The new attributes are
ignored by rendering classes that don't need them. All rendering
classes render all widgets in some form - some rendering classes
might have additional bells and whistles based upon the additional
attributes, while others downgrade gracefully and still provide a
usable screen rendering.
So, the widget XML would look something like this:
<container id="some-id" style="some-style" dojo="some Dojo data"
ajax="some Ajax data" foo="some foo data">
...
</container>
The additional attributes could be applied to any screen widget
element, not just the container element.
The advantage I see to this approach is it is fully backwards
compatible. We can add attributes to any screen widget element
without breaking existing rendering code.
That's it. Like I said, please add your ideas.
-Adrian
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