On Jul 23, 2009, at 10:51 PM, Adrian Crum wrote:
I'm glad this has been brought up. I agree that the current screen
widget conditional logic is cumbersome to use.
The use-when attribute is one alternative, another approach would be
to include support of the mini-lang if conditional element - so
multiple screen widgets can be included in a conditional block
(without the need for a section element).
While we're on the subject, the section element should be optional.
According to David Jones' comments, the section element was meant to
be a way to reuse sections of a screen. Yet that capability hasn't
been implemented.
Actually, the real reason was to have a consistent structure for
conditions, actions, and widgets regardless of whether it is the top-
level section or a section including as a widget (ie in the widgets
part of a section).
The idea of reuse with a section name was an after thought, and like
you say has not really been used or implemented for yet. However...
that could change especially for alternatives to the decorator pattern
(which some complain about as being overly complex).
-David
Every screen must have one main section element. If you try to
create more than one main section element the rest are ignored. The
end result is, every screen definition has an unnecessary section
element. From my perspective, a screen element should BE a section
element (in other words, a screen IS a section) which would
eliminate the need to create one, and section elements within the
screen should require a name - since the intent is to reuse that
section. If those rules were enforced, then the if element could
control the display of portions of screens, and the screen sections
are clearly meant to be reused.
-Adrian
--- On Thu, 7/23/09, Harmeet Bedi <harmeet.b...@gmail.com> wrote:
From: Harmeet Bedi <harmeet.b...@gmail.com>
Subject: use-when for widget-screen.xsd
To: "dev" <dev@ofbiz.apache.org>
Date: Thursday, July 23, 2009, 6:43 PM
I would like to ask you what you
think about having use-when attribute for various screen
elements and defaulted to true.
The current condition check and widgets, fail-widgets
mechanism is a bit wordy, does not allow easy switching for
any type of element and is not as close in grammer to
use-when in widget-form.xsd.. should make grammers closer if
possible in various spots.
I was hoping it to have it for all elements. so for
instance one could say something like this:
<include-form name="FormRef1"
location="SomeLocation.xml" use-when="${showRef1}"/>
<include-form name="FormRef2"
location="SomeLocation.xml" use-when="${showRef2}"/>
or container, or widget or etc..
<container use-when="${showSpecialCaseContainer}">
..
</container>
Thoughts ?
Harmeet
