Hi.
Aleksei,
This is very interesting what you've done.
> The source code would definitely be more enlightening.
As far as I understood my management, we won't be releaseing it open source. But
of course I can share parts of the code.
> How do you do these expanding/contracting panels?
They are actually not substracting/contracting. It's dynamic adding/removing of
children.
That's how it works. [+] and [-] buttons are AjaxCommandLinks with normal images
inside of them (see ajax4jsf library for the ajax components). They have bound
action handlers which know "their" panels.
When the link is clicked, ajax4jsf sends the request to the server and action
handler is invoked. The action handler (let's take [+] for instance) then knows
that he has to add new controls to his panel. These new controls are built in
the runtime and after that added to the corresponding panel.
The [+] AjaxCommandLink has its reRender attribute set to its panel id. So after
the action handler is invoked on the server side, the panel just gets
re-rendered within the page and it showes new controls after that.
AJAX with ajax4jsf has actually minimal impact on the processing. ajax4jsf is
really very non-intrusive. I can change all AjaxCommandLinks back to
HtmlCommandLinks and it will work just as well - with the exception that the
whole page will be reloaded on each button click.
The "tricky" part here is component creation. Well, it's also not tricky. You
just have to do what tags do - instantiate the components, add value/method
bindings, add children components or facets. Not too complex.
I am currently trying to extract business non-specific and non-critical things
into an open-source hifaces.dev.java.net project.
Bye.
/lexi
