I'm trying to write some custom widgets to simplify my site, and unfortunately this is far more difficult than it needs to be because the documentation on custom widgets is so bad. Sorry to be so blunt but it's plain that this side of TG has been neglected, despite how useful it could potentially be. What documentation there is seems limited either to pre-existing widgets and their specific parameters, or focuses entirely on forms (typically also built out of pre-existing widgets) I've just finished going through pretty much every link at http://docs.turbogears.org/1.0/Widgets and overall the amount of useful information communicated is low. I even have The Book, and that too focuses on the pre-built widgets and forms.
Let me as a general question, then a specific one. Generally - is there anywhere that actually goes through the widget specification properly? By this, I mean not yet another walkthrough to one person's hypothetical use case. TurboGears' documentation is full of these things and it is very frustrating. It is like being given directions to a destination from many other parts of the country when what you actually wanted was a map so that you can find it yourself. About the best I can find is http://www.turbogears.org/1.0/docs/api/turbogears.widgets.base.Widget-class.html, and even that is too vague to be very useful. "A callable can be passed and it will be called automatically when sending variables to the template." It can be passed where? When are 'variables sent' to the template? What parameters should this callable take? What should it return? Specifically - I want to write a widget that outputs some formatted data. I want to be able to tweak its formatting behaviour by passing in parameters, which I believe I can do via naming them in the params list and passing a named parameter to the constructor or to render. But then how do I call functions from inside the widget so that I can format data differently? I don't want to have to preformat the data that I pass to the widget, but instead want to pass a flag to the widget so that it can call different formatting functions on the data it's been supplied. It's a presentation issue so the logic for this should be in the view, not the controller. I can't seem to reference a widget's member function from within the template so I don't know how to do this. Perhaps the data needs processing on the way into the widget, but again, how would I do that given that the data can be injected at several different points? Sorry to sound so dissatisfied, but I get this every single time I sit down to work on TurboGears - 20 minutes of productivity followed by an hour of fruitless searching through docs and then a post on here. Ben Sizer. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TurboGears" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/turbogears?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
