I'm not quite convinced that <subdialog> is very useful as implemented. I see the usefulness in stringing existing dialogs together but certain byproducts of subdialog are undesirable. For instance, SHALE-153 which complains about how you can't easily access state information between a "parent" and "child" dialog.
I've discussed this with Craig before and IIRC he doesn't agree with me on this but I can't see how having subdialogs as "black boxes" is very useful. Maybe there are some use cases out there but it would seem to me that its much more common that you would want to share state across two dialogs. Here's a hypothetical example: Suppose you have a e-commerce site where you sell both physical products as well as downloadable software. You have the following "dialogs": shopping cart shipping payment download link Each of these "dialogs" represents a series of actions and views. For the physical goods you might want to compose a "physical goods" dialog as follows: shopping cart -> shipping -> payment For the downloadable software you might want to compose a dialog that uses the same shopping cart and payment dialogs as in the physical goods case: shopping cart -> payment -> download link If you compose these using <subdialog> you immediately run into problems. Your payment dialog has no access to any of the state generated by the shopping cart phase of the dialog. As a developer I don't want shopping cart and payment to be black boxes, I want them to work seamlessly together. I also don't want to configure the shopping cart and payment stuff twice in order to avoid this. I think the ability to plug dialogs into one another is really cool but in the past I have found myself doing various hacks and workarounds to get at the state information further down the stack. Of course we could make it optional to create a new state for the subdialog but there are other reasons not to bother with this. I have implemented my own prev, next, ok button scheme on top of shale dialogs and subdialogs significantly complicate this. Sean
