Just wanted to give a short notice, that I dumped the first working
version of an ajax auto complete field into the sandbox, the control
and a working servlet backend (working hopefully, it did it for me when
I generated the war).
The original is from the blueprints, but I adjusted the thing, so that
it does not need the com.sun classes anymore, fixed the javascript so
that it works with the IE as well (which made things nasty because I had
to introduce global vwrs), added a key handling routine for
the entry selection, and fixed one or two bugs along the way, and dumped
as much duplicate code as possible which was made redunend by connecting
the code to the myfaces hierarchy.
Note, this is rough alpha code, because I need to get things up and
running fast, due to a tight schedule, so dont complain about
inconsitencies and glitches along the codelines.
I have not made a component pack yet of this, but you can check it out
nevertheless.
a) read the small docs in the doc dir
b) get the war file from the build dir start your Tomcat from your bin
dir (this is important because I have some entity entries in the
controls.tld in the WEB-INF dir which are currently coded to that path.
or edit the WEB-INF controls.tld according to your needs
Start the server, and then access it with
<url to server>/customcontrols/autocompleteTest.jsf
You can check out the other two components in this pack by
<url to server>/customcontrols/colorcontrolTest.jsf
Enjoy....
Note this will be the last major notice about the sandbox, project,
because it is not really that important, but since lots of people were
crying for Ajax, I just wanted to give a short notice, that there is
something there, freshly ported from the blueprints and improved (and
added a handful of new bugs probably).
What will happen in the next few days...
Bugfixes along the way
I am going to look for options to marry the old components with the new
one, so that you get regexp non blocking validation and improved focus
signalling additionally to the autocomplete, also I will look into how
to ease the burden for backend development, I am not sure how to solve
this yet in a decent manner.
My opinion is, the autocomplete servlet should only work as a delegation
controller and serve the requests to some easy to implement classes,
which can register themselves into the controller, and catch the
incoming requests. Probably I will go that route or I will follow the
route of the original implementor who left some trial code for a
backend class which was hooked into the Phase Listeners (which I
probably wont because of performance concerns)
Werner
