Hi,
Over the past week-or-so, I've been working like a mad on a branch in my
repository ("master-fixup") which is a branch of - you guessed - master.
So, what's going on?
Last week, I discovered that the migration to a frame-less setup is both
great and has caused quite a bit of breakage. Great as in: pages seem to
render much more quickly after the initial load, they look much more
modern, etc.
But quite a bit of breakage in the sense that a number of techniques
employed in 1.4 now fail in master:
- In 1.4 we have full pages in a frame, including CSS and JS (taken from
the page's HEAD section)
in 1.5, the HTML from the body of the response is used and inserted into
the active page, skipping over the JS and CSS in the HEAD section
- In 1.4 we rewrite the HTML in the main frame when the document finishes
loading, in order to present nice dojo widgets
In 1.5, since there's no frame, we lost the "page is complete, now please
rewrite" moment; dojo is rewriting the widgets for us upon inserting into
the main page. This means the widgets have to be configured "just right" in
the HTML delivered to the insertion handler
- In 1.4, where you can use the back button to get to the previous page
(even though you lost the data entered due to the widget-rewriting), this
doesn't work in 1.5 anymore: the back button gets you out of the LedgerSMB
application all together.
So, what have I been doing on the branch?
- Converted all code to use dojo widget type declarations so the AMD
parser can act correctly upon inserting the HTML in the main page
- Fixed up bad HTML in old code so the AMD parser can make sense of it
- Added dojo type declarations to most(all?) old-code form element tags
- Enhanced the 'elements.html' helper template code to make sure it
identifies elements as the correct dojo widgets
- Introduced error reporting as a popup screen instead of replacing the
active page with the error report (closing the error popup gets back the
entered values now!)
- Cleaned/migrated templates (replacing "bare" form tags with calls to
'elements.html')
- Eliminated code duplication in both old and new code
- Eliminated the need for specialized LedgerSMB widgets derived from dojo
widgets by making better use of dojo's options do pass constructor arguments
- Merge multiple JS
- Merge multiple CSS files
- Remove the entire manual DOM/widget construction (in favor of depending
on the AMD parser completely)
All that we have left now is some processing of the final HTML document
to attach onClick and onSubmit events to make sure the content is loaded
into the right places in the destination DOM correctly
While going over all the screens (which I have only mildly tested so far,
but enough to find these problems), I found a bad interaction between the
move from DBObject - LedgerSMB's built-in "ORM" mapper - to PGObject and
the move from frames to frameless. I'll send a separate mail later to
present the problem and a solution design.
So, what's left to be done?
Well, lots of testing, of course. However, the following items are also
required to be completed:
- Fix the fallout from the move from DBObject to PGObject
- Consolidation of the various CSS files into a single CSS file (because
the in the frameless situation, the separate CSS files won't be loaded upon
the page loads anymore)
- Rewrite the JS in the following files to leverage Dojo's widget system
so the JS files get loaded dynamically when the AMD loader detects they're
needed for the page being presented:
* payments_detail.js
* maximize_minimize.js
* asset.js
* preference.js
- Create some well-defined back-button behaviour; while the back button
behaviour in 1.4 isn't exactly to my liking, it mostly works. In
1.5/master, since all documents are loaded into a single page, the
webbrowser history won't get any changes after the initial 'login.pl' URL.
Hitting "Back" once and you'll be out of the LedgerSMB webapp.
I'm expecting much of this work to be completed by the end of the week. At
that time, it would be great if people could start experimenting with
master/1.5 (not for alpha or beta, just playing with it) so we get a better
idea of the quality of the code and the problems that are still there. I'll
do so too, of course, but one/two persons can only test so much.
My aim is for the branch to be merged back to master as quickly as possible
in order to get master in a stable state and work on further
features/stabilization from there.
Thanks for listening! I hope you all join in on testing next weekend!
Regards,
--
Bye,
Erik.
http://efficito.com -- Hosted accounting and ERP.
Robust and Flexible. No vendor lock-in.
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