Forget whatever I was thinking, I think Jason is on the right track!
Ironically, I add custom attributes all the time in numerous situations,
but it frankly escaped me as a possible solution here.
All you really need beyond this is probably a new tag that renders a JS
function that you can pass an object reference and it will do the setting
of the style for you. So, you get:
<html>
<head>
<html:styleSwitcher />
</head>
<body>
<html:form>
<html:button errorStyle="itsucks" normalStyle="basicstyle" />
</html:form>
</body></html>
Which emits:
<html>
<head>
<script>
function styleSwitcher(obj, error) {
if (error) {
obj.style = obj.errorStyle;
} else {
obj.style = obj.normalStyle;
}
}
</script>
</head>
<body>
<html:form>
<html:button errorStyle="itsucks" normalStyle="basicstyle" />
</html:form>
</body></html>
... or similar such thing (I'm just dumping off the top of my head here).
The developer has simply to call styleSwitcher(form.element, true); in the
validation code to switch the style to the error style or
styleSwitcher(form.element, false); to switch it back to normal.
Thanks Jason, even if it doesn't go this way I can very much see this
being helpful in my own work. Great call!
--
Frank W. Zammetti
Founder and Chief Software Architect
Omnytex Technologies
http://www.omnytex.com
On Mon, April 18, 2005 2:41 pm, Jason King said:
>
>>
>>
>> Now, you raise a good point as to how the Javascript could capitalize
>> on the presence of the errorStyle attribute, which normally is only
>> interpreted on page load. That is, if you did any client side
>> validation, you'd probably like to be able to switch the style of the
>> invalid field to whatever was specified in "errorStyle" even if there
>> was no error when the page loaded. This is valuable outside of the
>> specifics of an Ajax situation and would also apply to any client-side
>> validation. Unfortunately, I'm having trouble seeing a particularly
>> clean way to do it which wouldn't involve loading down the base tags
>> (because of single inheritance) and even then, I think you'd have a
>> pretty contentious time getting people to agree on what the base tags
>> should output. I guess maybe you could have some Application scoped
>> "input tag decorator" which could be invoked by the tag if present
>> while still leaving things open for customization...
>>
>> Joe
>>
>>
> This one is simple. HTML ignores attributes it doesn't understand.
> That means all your input boxes etc. could have an errorStyle attribute
> defined (and probably a normalStyle as well) and then when the js
> validation code runs it could look to see if such attributes are defined
> and then copy the value of errorStyle or normalStyle as appropriate to
> style when validating. In other words your emitted HTML would look like
> <input type="text" name="lastname" style="basicstyle"
> errorStyle="itsucks" normalStyle="basicstyle" value="King"
> onChange="some_js_function(this)">
> The element renders correctly, validators that don't flip styles ignore
> the extra attributes validators that use them have them. I know its
> bizarre, adding atttributes to objects at run-time, but that's the world
> of the DOM.
> Its' been a while since I tested this, I believe if I have a text input
> object in the variable oTxt to find out its "errorStyle" attribute I
> have to use js like:
> var es = oTxt.getAttribute("errorStyle"); // returns null if no such
> attribute exists.
>
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