In general the issue is: what is(are) the problem(s) this is meant to solve?
Here are some comments on the stuff I saw in the opentaps mailing list
discussion about this:
Extending the form widget is really pretty easy, and most of the time really
pretty unnecessary as long as someone on the team really knows how to use it
and CSS well.
So IMO for OFBiz this sort of practice would not be of much value. Their macro
library will likely become bloated and difficult to organize and structure, and
therefore difficult to use, and with what was described it doesn't look like
they are getting a lot of code savings over straight up FTL templates, but they
ARE sacrificing some ease in customization and making it much more difficult to
reskin for custom sites. So no, I don't think we'd want to do anything like
this in OFBiz.
Of course, that's just my first glance opinion based on previous experience,
mostly with JSP tag libs and other such things. Without really trying it out
and finding out what sorts of problems the form widgets is not helping with, I
couldn't say for sure.
-David
Jonathon -- Improov wrote:
What's the main reason against that approach?
I think using Freemarker macros can allow for more reusable chunks of
UIs than Widget Forms can. And of course, using Freemarker means you can
make your UIs as pretty or plain as you want, HTML/CSS limits are the
limits here.
One problem with this approach I can see: I'm missing the convenient
<entity-options>.
Jonathon
David E Jones wrote:
I think the opentaps guys (Si Chen, Leon Torres, Chris Libery, etc)
have worked on something along these lines.
I'm not a huge fan of this approach (ie a generic library of macros as
a form widget replacement or to use in ecommerce applications), but
they have been working on it and I imagine have at least had some
success with it.
-David
Jonathon -- Improov wrote:
Hi to all of you out there having fun with freemarker macros!
Just to confirm, freemarker macros cannot be nested?
Has anybody built any base suite of macros that can do most of what
Widget Forms can do?
Jonathon
