Re: [Dynapi-Dev] New ways to create a DynLayer!

[Benoit Marchant]

Well, I would keep it. A problem I see in dynapi3 is that the naming conventions of the setter methods and their instance variables isn't consistent. It makes it harder to remember things, particularly the width and height. The instance variable are w and h, but the methods are setWidth/getWidth, so many time I found myself using alayer.width.
I guess it's much more efficient in javascript to do  this.w = 0, the this.setWidth(0), right ? Which means that for performance reasons we are (unfortunately) strongly encouraged to call as less function as possible ?

Apart from the fact that it makes using the api a little more difficult, it makes it harder to automate setting a value by a dictionary that will be used by a function, like the html property. The method is setHTML, and the property is html. If they were following a consistent naming convention like

property -> html
setter -> setHtml

Then we could do something like the following:

DynObject.prototype.takeValuesFromDictionary = function(values) {


var key in values) {
/* This would be a workaround when you want to call a function without relying of an existing naming convention: ex aLayer.takeValuesFromDictionary({setHTML:'test'});

if(typeof(this[key]) == "function") {
this[key](values[key]);
}
else {
*/
var setterName = 'set'+ key.charAt(0).toUpperCase(); + key.slice(1);
if(this[setterName] && typeof(this[setterName] == "function")) {
this[setterName](values[key]);
}
else

this[key] = values[key];
//}
}
}

So the idea is that you first test if an setter exists for this key, and if it does, use it, otherwise affect the instance variable directly.
The big win is on ease of use, and compact code, which means less to download.

Related to this, I wonder what would be the performance of using the watch method on properties that need additional code when set, like html ? It would greatly reduce the use of functions. Does anyone have tried this from a performance point of view ?

Benoit

On Thursday, March 6, 2003, at 12:20  PM, Raymond Irving wrote:

So would you suggest that we keep both methods or just
used the original method?

Any other comments?

--
Raymond Irving

--- Benoit Marchant <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I ran the 2 versions in IE on the mac, creating 2000
layers with 
speedtest.dynlayer-basic.html. And it looks like the
regular method is 
faster, but not all the time. I don't get consistent
results each time.

Benoit

On Wednesday, March 5, 2003, at 09:20  AM, Raymond
Irving wrote:

Hello,

Benoit had originally suggested that we use a
dictionary object (hash table) to pass parameters
to
DynLayers but that proved must slower than using
html,x,y,w,h,color. 9I think I've found a way to
let
the two co-exist:

Old way - The original and fastest creation
method:
DynLayer(html,x,y,w,h,bgcolor)

New ways - slower but more flexible creation
methods:
DynLayer({html:'Hello',x:100,y:100});
DynLayer({zIndex:2,w:100,h:100});
DynLayer({textSelectable:true});


DynLayer({anchor:{top:0,bottom:0},textSelectable:true});
DynLayer({textSelectable:false,html:'Cool!'});
DynLayer({x:100,y:100,w:10,h:10,visible:false});

inline layer - when id is set x,y,w,h,bgcolor,z
and
html will be replaced with values from inline div:

DynLayer({id:'myinline'});
DynLayer({id:'boxer',anchor:{left:0:right:0}});

Optional arguments:
x,y,w,h,html,bgColor,zIndex,textSelectable,
anchor,visible,id


Changes are inside the attached dynlayer_ie.js
file.
Please perform all the speed test and improvements
you
can to see if the new creation method makes any
sense
at all.


--
Raymond Irving



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