Jacopo,
That's a great suggestion. Let me try that out.
-Adrian
Jacopo Cappellato wrote:
Adrian,
this is a very interesting subject.
My first comment/question is: could we use the "decorator" pattern as a
simple way to define generic templates?
For example: we could have a decorator screen for the generic Find
screen (with placeholders for the parameters form and for the list
form); then the specific find screens will just use that decorator by
setting the form names to fill the placeholders.
Jacopo
Adrian Crum wrote:
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
