I'm resurrecting this thread because I've spent some time looking into
the whole third party rendering library support idea and I think I have
a simple solution.
I thought about David's suggestion of having new widgets that are
effects based. I don't think that will be a good strategy because not
all browsers will have javascript enabled - which would render those
widgets useless.
A better approach I would like to propose is to use the Prototype
javascript library in combination with EXISTING widgets to improve their
response and functionality. The widget rendering code would detect if
the browser supports javascript, and output the correct HTML to
accommodate the browser.
Instead of a "live-form" widget, the existing form widget would detect
browser support, and render an improved form if the browser supports it.
The current paginated tables would use Ajax calls to scroll through
pages instead of refreshing the whole screen.
Basically, I'd like to see the cool effects and improved response
implemented without any additional work on the widget XML files.
What do you think?
-Adrian
David E Jones wrote:
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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