Ralph Goers wrote:
Sylvain Wallez wrote:
Ralph Goers wrote:
I have been asked to look into how custom form widgets can be
added. With the block structure in 2.2 this would imply that the
widgets would need to be added to our own block. How can we
"append" to the widget definitions in cocoon-forms.xconf without
touching that file since it will be internal to the forms block?
The structure of component management currently doesn't allow this,
as the FormManager creates its own ServiceSelector, and therefore
can't use the xconf includes. This is something that must be changed
though.
Any ideas as to how? This doesn't seem like it would apply to only
forms and that includes would really solve the problem. Rather, it
would seem that a block should be able to "tell" the container to add
configuration data to some other block's configuration.
While adding the xconf include feature, I also heavily changed the way
component selectors are managed (although this is totally transparent).
The DefaultServiceSelector actually registers the component it manages
in the CoreServiceManager, and does a lookup in that service manager
when its select() method is called.
Simply put:
selector.addComponent(hint, config)
--> manager.addComponent(selectorRole + "/" + hint, config)
selector.select(hint)
--> return manager.lookup(selectorRole + "/" + hint)
The benefit of this approach is that a selector for a given role (e.g.
datasources, source-factories) can be declared several times, as the
selector basically delegates everything to the surrounding service
manager, which manages all included files. The component space is
effectively flattened.
As a side note, this also makes selector useseless, as you can directly
call "manager.lookup(role + "/" + hint)".
This approach requires selectors to be direct children of the service
manager in the container hierarchy. CForms currently defines additional
levels: the DefaultFormManager creates a SimpleServiceSelector that
holds all widget builders. This approach prevents flattening the
component space in CForms, and therefore the use of includes to define
additional custom widgets. Obviously we'll have to change this.
Sylvain
--
Sylvain Wallez Anyware Technologies
http://bluxte.net http://www.anyware-tech.com
Apache Software Foundation Member Research & Technology Director
