In the authoring environment for Sakaibrary's Subject Research Guide tool, there are a few places where we need a modal dialog. We have been using the jquery.simplemodal.js plug-in for that (http://www.ericmmartin.com/projects/simplemodal/ ). It works pretty well but there are some open issues. In another project, Noah Botimer is using the SimpleModal plug-in and has outlined some changes he made to fix some of the issues we're having. I haven't had a chance to look at Noah's work yet.
I am writing to inquire whether anyone else is working on similar issues in sakai or implementing modal dialogs in other ways. My hope is that we can agree on a standard approach to modal dialogs across sakai that will not have the problems we've encountered. Here's a brief description of the issues we are having: When launched, SimpleModal covers our current document with a grey overlay (in a div) and shows the modal dialog in the center of that overlay. There are two problems with the way we have implemented that using the SimpleModal plug-in. First, our document is in an iframe, so only that part of the UI is greyed-out. Ideally the entire sakai UI would be covered to make the dialog more fully modal (i.e. the user would need to dismiss the modal dialog before initiating some action within sakai but outside the modal dialog). Also, the modal dialog is centered in the overlay, which may extend well beyond the visible portion of the document in the browser window. The user may need to scroll up or down to see the modal dialog. I think it's likely that this is a problem in our configuration of the plug-in, but I haven't yet seen a way to fix that (still need to look at Noah's work to see whether this is addressed there). Our most immediate need is to fix the positioning of the modal dialog so the user doesn't need to scroll to find it. My major question is whether anybody else is working with SimpleModal or other methods of implementing modal dialogs in sakai. Is there already a preferred way to do this in sakai? If not, does anybody have suggestions about how we should decide on a preferred way to do this? Thanks. Jim _______________________________________________ fluid-work mailing list [email protected] http://fluidproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fluid-work
