Comments on: What is a _Widget

By: gtducati

gtducati — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 16:08:17 +0000

Thanks for the insight. I’ll definitely be implementing something similar in the near future.

By: dante

dante — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:22:36 +0000

The DataTextBox as a popupClass attribute, iirc. It is set to dijit._Calendar. The _Calendar is being created and managed directly by the TextBox widget, connecting to the Calendar’s onChange attribute to know when to show/hide/focus the input … You wouldn’t directly inherit from _Calendar at all, unless all you wanted was a _Calendar on a page, but typically, you’d want to wrap that in your own class as a shim to prevent the “private” _Calendar class from being access directly by your users (if you are making a product that other’s will build from)

By: gtducati

gtducati — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 13:12:38 +0000

Ok, so I’m looking in the right places. But back to my question in trying to understand how to make my own widget using _Calendar: how exactly is the output of the _Calendar being serialized to the textfield in dijit.form.DateTextBox?

By: dante

dante — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 12:51:23 +0000

Yes. The Dijit.form stuff is particularly confusing in it’s inheritance chain. Not everything you dojo.require() only provide()’s that same thing. For instance, all the “buttons” (dropdown, and normal button) are in dijit.form.Button. TooltipDialog lives in dijit.Dialog.js –

By: gtducati

gtducati — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 12:47:23 +0000

That makes sense. So for dijit.form.DateTextBox, how exactly is the output of the _Calendar being serialized to this extended base class of dijit.form._DateTimeTextBox? Looking deeper, I can see that dijit.form._DateTimeTextBox is an extended class of dijit.form.RangeBoundTextBox, but dijit.form.RangeBoundTextBox isn’t anywhere in its expected directory; although, a dojo.require is calling dijit.form.ValidationTextBox. Can you see my confusion?

By: dante

dante — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 11:39:15 +0000

In dijit, the _ means a couple of things: If it’s inside of a Class, it means it’s a private member and not meant to be used directly (it could go away potentially, public methods, however, will not). In the case of _Widget, and _Calendar, it indicates, it simply means they are meant to be created directly, but rather to be used as a Base Class or Mixin for your own widgets. For instance, a dijit.form.DateTextBox uses a _Calendar as it’s popup.

By: gtducati

gtducati — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 01:33:24 +0000

Just out of curiosity, why is the widget class spelled as “_Widget?” I also noticed this for the calendar, namely “_Calendar.”

By: sabbaath

sabbaath — Wed, 07 May 2008 15:44:41 +0000

FYI,

Dante’s example at the link above is broken. Some of the key code blocks are now empty. If you click through to his ImageAccordian html page example, several 404’s show up in firebug.

sabbaath

By: Great Dojo Widget tutorial « SOS

Great Dojo Widget tutorial « SOS — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 13:01:56 +0000

[...] Posted by Shane O’Sullivan on 22 April, 2008 Pete Higgins has posted a great tutorial on how to write a Dojo widget, taking as an example his recent addition, FisheyeLite. Check it out at http://dojocampus.org/content/?p=100 [...]

By: dante

dante — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 11:47:21 +0000

Just as an updated note, “Wild” Bill Keese of Dijit fame pointed out to me you should be able to call _Widget.disconnect() on a handle returned by _Widget.connect(), making my statement about this.connect(node,event,method) not being able to be disconnected false. .connect() seems to return the handle just like dojo.connect() would, and disconnect() seems to successfully remove the connection from the this._connects hash. I stand corrected. Thanks bill –