After working with the screen widgets for a while, and having modified
them too, I've come to the conclusion that the project could really
benefit from higher level screen widgets.
The first benefit I see is reduced XML code needed. I recently committed
a screenlet widget that significantly reduces the amount of XML needed
to create a screenlet.
There is a Jira issue open to discuss a standard Find screen layout
(https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OFBIZ-1635) and since nearly
every component has one or more Find screens, that could become a widget
too. An entire Find screen could be defined with 5 lines of XML.
The second benefit I see would be the reduction of screen widget
"hacks." Take for instance the following line
<container style="clear"/>
which is used to clear floats in a multicolumn page layout. The problem
with that line of widget code is that it is HTML specific. Other
rendering formats might not need to "clear floats."
A better solution would be to have an added attribute for the <section>
or <container> elements called "column-count" or something that
specifies the number of columns the section of screen contains. The
element would accept only <column> sub-elements. The HTML rendering
classes would be able to render the multi-column layout properly and
insert float clearing elements where necessary. Float clearing is no
longer the responsibility of the XML code.
I'm not suggesting that we go overboard and create widgets for every
collection of screen elements, but there are some screen element
collections that occur frequently enough that a widget for them would
reduce XML code and speed up the development process.
What do you think?
-Adrian
