Re: v2 forms flowscript example

[Sylvain Wallez]

Christopher Oliver wrote:

Sylvain Wallez wrote:

Christopher Oliver wrote:

Tim Larson wrote:

In: cocoon-2.1/src/blocks/forms/samples/v2/forms_flow_example.js
Should this:
   // 'wid' is a javascript wrapper of the Cocoon Form widget.
   //
   // Its subwidgets can be accessed by id.
be changed to this:
   // 'wid' is a javascript wrapper of the Cocoon Form widget.
   //
   // The javascript wrappers of its subwidgets can be accessed by id.
to be accurate?
--Tim Larson

Actually, I don't think it should even mention "wrappers". IMO, the 
underlying Java widgets are an implementation detail of the 
Flowscript API and should never be used directly in a script. The 
documentation should simply say that the return value of 
Form.getWidget() is the JS representation of <fd:form> instance.


Why is there a need to have a different API for widgets when used 
from JS than when used from Java? IMO, this is arbitrarily limiting 
the features available in flowscript.

The good thing of these wrappers is that they simplify the notation 
for browsing the widget tree (by avoiding 'getWidget()'), but the 
fact that some limits come with this simplified notation is IMO not 
good.


There isn't (or shouldn't be) any limitation in functionality in the 
V2 API. Do you see a  limitation?


I haven't made the exhaustive comparision between ScriptableWidget and 
every Widget implementation, but my bell rang when seeing all methods of 
all widgets gathered in a single class.

Furthermore, what if someone designs their own new widget with some 
specific APIs? They simply cannot access them unless they modify the 
ScriptableWidget class, which will hold all APIs of all widgets (this 
is already the case with e.g. repeater-specific functions).


It wasn't my goal to allow user-defined widgets, but if that is 
desired it should be possible to refactor ScriptableWidget to make it 
easy to do that.


AFAIU, this could be achieved by extending NativeJavaObject and just 
adding shortcut access to child widgets in has() and get(). Am I right?

Sylvain

--
Sylvain Wallez                                  Anyware Technologies
http://www.apache.org/~sylvain           http://www.anyware-tech.com
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