oceatoon wrote:
Hi,
I rather ask some advice before moving on.
I am reading through all the existent post and wiki's about creating new
widgets, also looked through Tim's GUI New, Class, Union, Struct way of
doing things, to try and sort out a way of creating a widget that maps on
an extenal selection list, and where every generated "input" or widget
would be connected a text area. (For example, having checkbox | label | text, as many times as I have items
in the selection list)
I can only see a general view but have trouble deciding which way to go, I'd
really appreciate some guidance.
could be for example, a repeater , which maps on a selection list, so I would have to implement
this, is it a possibility?
IMO, a repeater is really the way to go. Writing a new kind of widget is needed only for new ways of handling data or form structure.
For the binding, there are two features that provide a solution for unusual scenarios which, for containers, seems to be more frequent than "regular" ones :-)
These are:
- the javascript binding, where you can do whatever you want with the widget and bound data. Back in june (after 2.1.5), I added a <fb:child-bindings> to the js binding to allow the container structure to be handled by the js code and delegate binding of elements to unary bindings such as <fb:value>.
- the widget (including form) attributes, allowing to pass arbitrary data between flowscript and the various js snippets in the form definition, without relying on some global variables that would break the context isolation of continuations.
So you could store your selection list (or a collection representing it) and use it in a js binding on the repeater.
Hope this helps!
Sylvain
-- Sylvain Wallez Anyware Technologies http://www.apache.org/~sylvain http://www.anyware-tech.com { XML, Java, Cocoon, OpenSource }*{ Training, Consulting, Projects }
