Thanks David! I'll try your suggestion.
Regarding the Dojo support strategy I had in mind: it has been mentioned
in the past that something like that could be implemented by extending
the existing HTML rendering classes. I agree with that view, since these
libraries simply add attributes and such to regular HTML. Hence the
factory method - a properties file specifies which rendering classes to
use. It works the same way as the FreeMarkerWorker loading transforms thing.
I hadn't gotten to the widget XML side of things yet. The ideas I've had
so far try to keep within the constraint that the widget XML files
should be rendering-platform independent. I don't have any specifics
yet, but the general idea I had in mind was to keep the existing widget
elements, but have an additional element attribute that allows
developers to pass library-specific data to the rendering classes.
Anyways, I was planning on submitting my current work to Jira for review
and comment. Let me work out this one problem, submit the patch to Jira,
and then we can work out how to support Dojo, Ajax, etc. Does that sound
okay?
-Adrian
David E Jones wrote:
You should be able to cast the ones you pass in, but I'm still not
totally sure how you're doing this.
Could you send a code snippet or just commit the code you're working on
in an inactive state (ie not called by anything)?
BTW, in general for the AJAX stuff my thought was to add new widget
elements to the screen definition for new types of UI elements, like an
AJAX combo-box that does server-side lookups as the user is typing
things in. I think we already have another combobox that is
pre-populated when the page is loaded, but I'd rather have these be
different in the screen definition XML so that both could be used and it
would be easy to switch between them.
In other words, I don't know if there is any place where we would
override the default functionality, I'd rather add these as new features
with new XML elements (or attributes to extend existing ones) and make
them otherwise independent of the existing stuff.
-David
On Feb 15, 2008, at 8:50 AM, Adrian Crum wrote:
I'm working on modifying the screen widgets to support Dojo (or any
other third party library). I set up the widgets to get their
rendering classes from a factory method instead of using the new
operator. The factory method uses the ObjectType.getInstance(...)
methods to create the class instances.
Everything works great except for one thing. Some of the rendering
classes have constructors that take
javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest
javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse
arguments. When I use the request and response objects found in the
screen widget context as arguments for the ObjectType.getInstance(...)
method, an exception is thrown - because the objects don't implement
the correct interfaces:
java.lang.NoSuchMethodException:
org.ofbiz.widget.html.HtmlFormRenderer.<init>(org.apache.catalina.connector.RequestFacade,
org.apache.catalina.connector.ResponseFacade).
Those classes implement the javax.servlet.ServletRequest and
javax.servlet.ServletResponse interfaces - which are the super
interfaces of the ones needed for the constructor.
I'm stuck. I don't know where to go from here.
Any ideas?
-Adrian
