I've been working with ExtJS for a good few months now, but still don't have a perfectly clear map of what's going on behind the scenes there. I'm just talking about the building blocks of the framework and their most basic functionality.
Ext.Component
Ext.Element
DOM.Element
DOM.Node (?)
CompositeElement (?)
Whatever else (?)
For each of the abovementioned I would like to know:
How to select: by ID, by class, via parent, find (OR children OR query OR select? WTF), siblings, ComponentQuery, DOM-query, CSS-query, etc..
How to manipulate in the tree: create, append, prepend, insert after this sibling, move to that parent, remove, destroy, etc..
How to manipulate on the screen: show, hide, fade, slide, move up, down, change size, etc..
How to identify related to each other: find DOM.Element knowing its Ext.Component, find Ext.Component knowing its DOM.Element, etc..
What is the dependency between them: what happens to the DOM.Element if its Ext.Component is hidden / destroyed / changed / moved, what happens to the Ext.Component if its Ext.Element is hidden / destroyed / changed / moved, etc.
I'm looking for a methodical and logically clear layout of how each is supposed to be used and is expected to behave. I am also hoping that the described functionality can be grouped in corresponding categories, e.g. would be nice to see complement traversing methods .up() and .down() next to each other, rather than alphabetically pages apart. Of course links and examples (which the official documentation lacks so badly) are also welcome!
You can find out a whole lot about the building blocks of ExtJS (known as Ext Core) from the manual for this: http://docs.sencha.com/core/manual/. I will try to add some knowledge and highlight some key points, but you should definitely read through that for a very informative overview.
Ext.Component
The building block for the OOP paradigm within ExtJS. Essentially, this is an Object that contains inherited functionality to serve as the basis for a specialized component that will be transformed by the framework into DOM elements that are shown as HTML.
The Sencha documentation is excellent for this. Here are a couple good places to start:
http://docs.sencha.com/extjs/4.2.1/#!/guide/layouts_and_containers
http://docs.sencha.com/extjs/4.2.1/#!/guide/components
Ext.Element vs DOM Element
As an JavaScript develop knows, a DOM element is just a JS object that represents a tag in the document's HTML. Essentially, Ext.Element is a wrapper object for a DOM element that allows for ExtJS to manipulate the object. Any DOM element on the page can be wrapped as an Ext.Element to allow for this additional functionality.
For example, take this HTML tag:
<div id="myDiv">My content</div>
You can access this using
var el = document.getElementById('myDiv')
and use the basic, built-in JavaScript DOM functionality on el. You could also access this using
var el = Ext.get('myDiv')
and have a whole additional set of functionality available to apply to that element using the ExtJS library
The Sencha docs are also excellent for this. See all the available functionality for Ext.Element here: http://docs.sencha.com/extjs/4.2.1/#!/api/Ext.dom.Element
Misc
You can get an Ext.Element from a component using the getEl() method:
var myComponent = Ext.create('Ext.Component', { html: 'my component' });
var el = myComponent.getEl();
You would rarely need to go the other way, to determine a component from a DOM element. There isn't much of a use case there unless you are really hacking something. A major reason for using a framework like ExtJS is to prevent needing to do something like this; if should develop entirely within the JavaScript, you should be able to avoid having a reference to a DOM element where you need to get its containing ExtJS component.
Niklas answered pretty well about how to select components and elements. The only things I would really add is that you can use up() and down() to select relative to a component. In this way, you should use itemId on components rather than the global identifier id (using id can cause difficult-to-debug errors if you are reusing components with the same ID).
Also, to add to Niklas's answer about showing/hiding components, the framework does indeed add some CSS to the component's element, depending on what the hideMode for the component is. Learn more about that property here: http://docs.sencha.com/extjs/4.2.1/#!/api/Ext.AbstractComponent-cfg-hideMode
An excellent way to learn more is to look through all of the examples that come packaged with the framework. Open the examples in your browser, then look through the code to find out how things are done. You will find it way easier to learn this way, rather than reading it on paper or a website. Nothing beats experience when it comes to learning something new.
How to select: by ID, by class, via parent, find (OR children OR query OR select? WTF), siblings, ComponentQuery, DOM-query, CSS-query, etc..
Ext.ComponentQuery.query("*") // get all
Ext.ComponentQuery.query("button") // all buttons
Ext.ComponentQuery.query("#myid") // all controls / components myid
Ext.ComponentQuery.query("#myid", rootelement) // all controls / components myid with rootelement
Ext.ComponentQuery.query("#myid,button") // all buttons or controls / components myid
How to manipulate in the tree: create, append, prepend, insert after this sibling, move to that parent, remove, destroy, etc..
Adding button to a View:
Ext.ComponentQuery.query("#viewId")[0].add(new Ext.Button({ text: 'test'}));
There is also insert, remove and so on depending on the control you are querying.
How to manipulate on the screen: show, hide, fade, slide, move up, down, change size, etc..
Ext.ComponentQuery.query("button").forEach(function(button){ button.hide(); }) // hide all buttons
There is also show, disable, enable and so on depending on the control you are querying.
How to identify related to each other: find DOM.Element knowing its Ext.Component, find Ext.Component knowing its DOM.Element, etc..
Finding Ext.Component knowing its Dom.Element is pretty easy, you just take the ID from the DOM element and use Ext.ComponentQuery.query("#id").
There is also Ext.select('#id') for getting the object from an ID.
With the element property you can get the DOM:
var dom = Ext.ComponentQuery.query("button")[0].element.dom // Getting the DOM from the first button
var dom2 = component.element.dom // does also work as long as component is a valid sencha touch component
What is the dependency between them: what happens to the DOM.Element if its Ext.Component is hidden / destroyed / changed / moved, what happens to the Ext.Component if its Ext.Element is hidden / destroyed / changed / moved, etc.
I think, I'm not sure, that if you call .hide for instance there will be some CSS applied to the DOM for example: display: none. Internally they can use some framework like jQuery for that or the old school version document.getElementById('id').css and so one. If you call .show, it may change to display: block or whatever type it was before(this could be saved in the Sencha Touch class).
I don't know what happens if the DOM element gets destroyed. Probably the element too and then the garbage collector has some work to do.
If there are any more questions / something was unclear or not enough, don't hesitate to ask.
An attempt to answer the question myself.
Since there is no TABLE markup support on this website, I put my answer in this shared Spreadsheet. Note the comments on mouse rollover.
It's just a pattern for now. It needs work to get more legible and complete. Feel free to comment, or ask me if you would like to edit it.
Related
I'm learning Halogen at the moment but I have a hard time finding how to chain actions. Let's say I have a simple article list component. I also have an "add" button to create a new article to be edited in place in the list.
My approach would be to bind an AddArticle action to the onClick action of the button. In the handleAction function, I'd add a new empty article at the end of the article list model. Then I´d like to scroll to this newly created article. That's where I'm lost. To scroll to this newly created article, I'd have to have a ref to the new article, but it has not been redered yet. So here's the precise question:
How could I chain the two Effects of creating the new article (modify_ the state of the component) and the scrolling to this newly created element ?
In Halogen, whenever you modify the state of a component, it immediately re-renders. Halogen doesn't try to do anything clever with batching renders or anything like that, exactly so the behaviour is predictable and reliable for situations like this.
So here, you'd write it the way you described, pretty much:
handleAction = case _ of
AddArticle -> do
H.modify_ ?addArticle
ref <- H.getHTMLElementRef ?refName
H.liftEffect (?scrollTo ref)
I'm currently looking for a way to capture only svelte components on the DOM tree during development mode. I can see that we I run npm run dev all elements and conponents have the "class='svelte-somerandomID'". Does this only happen in development mode?
Yes, it's only in during development that all elements get a scoping class -- and only with some tools. Actually it's a hack we've added in vite-plugin-svelte to enable more power CSS only HMR.
The classes you're referring to are what Svelte uses to make the CSS in a component apply only to the elements of this component. It adds a class that is unique to the component to all elements that can be affected by the component's CSS, and it also modifies your CSS rules to add the same class to them.
Normally the compiler only adds the scoping class to elements that can actually be targeted by the existing CSS rules in your component. If you really want all the elements in a component to have the scoping class, you can use the same trick that I linked to above: add the following rule to your component's CSS.
* {}
By default the generated class names are a hash of the component's CSS content. But you can also customize them with the cssHash compiler option. Note that vite-plugin-svelte also changes how the class names are generated, to be based on the file name instead of the content.
Since every element in the component would be targeted by this roule, this will cause the Svelte compiler to add the scoping class to all the elements.
If you wanted to automatically generalize this to every element of every component, you may want to do it with a preprocessor (if you need some inspiration, the code I've linked too actually implement this with a preprocessor).
I'm not sure if this is what you really want though. For one thing, only elements get a scoping class: components don't get a scoping class, because components don't have dedicated elements in the DOM (only the ones you may or may not add via the component's markup). The above trick would only give you a mean to select every element of a Svelte component. There might probably be easier or cleaner ways to achieve what you really want. For example, a simple wrapping component, or an action, that would use wrappingElement.querySelectorAll('*') or something...
I noticed that hyperHTML preserves references I make to elements:
let div = document.createElement("div");
div.textContent = "Before Update";
hyperHTML.bind(document.body)`static1 - ${div} - static2`;
div.textContent = "After Update";
Above will produce a page that says:
static1 - After Update - static2
It is my understanding that hyperHTML ultimately clones an HTML <tempate> element to render the final output. However, don't you typical lose references when cloning an HTML template (like the variable "div" in the example above)?
Therefore, on the initial render, does hyperHTML somehow replace cloned elements with their originals after cloning the HTML template?
Here's how I think it works:
Create an HTML Template of the original template literal while
replacing all interpolations with comments.
Clone the html template with comments left in.
Make elements or document fragments out of each interpolation originally recieved
Replace each comment in the clone with its processed interpolation.
Is this correct?
I am not sure what is the question here, but there is a documentation page, and various examples too to understand how to use hyperHTML, which is not exactly in the way you are using it.
In fact, there's no need to have any reference there because hyperHTML is declarative, so you'd rather write:
function update(text) {
var render = hyperHTML.bind(document.body);
render`static1 - <div>${text}</div> - static2`;
}
and call update("any text") any time you need.
Here's how I think it works ... Is this correct?
No, it's not. hyperHTML doesn't clone anything the way you described, it associates once per unique template tag a sanitized version to the output and finds out all interpolated holes in it.
The part of the library that does this is called domtagger, and the mapping per template literal is based on the standard fact that these are unique per scope:
const templates = [];
function addTemplate(template, value) {
templates.push(template);
return template.join(value);
}
function asTemplate(value) {
return addTemplate`number ${value}!`;
}
asTemplate(1);
asTemplate(2);
asTemplate(Math.random());
templates[0] === templates[1]; // true
templates[1] === templates[2]; // true
// it is always the same template object!
After that, any other element using once that very same tag template will have a clone of that fragment with a map to find holes once and some complex logic to avoid replacing anything that's already known, being that text, attributes, events, or any other kind of node.
hyperHTML never removes comments, it uses these as pin and then uses domdiff to eventually update nodes related to these pins whenever there's a need to update anything.
Domdiff is a vDOM-less implementation of the petit-dom algorithm, which in turns is based on E.W Myers' "An O(ND) Difference Algorithm and Its Variations" paper.
Whenever you have DOM nodes in the holes, hyperHTML understand that and fill these holes with those nodes. If you pass repeatedly the same node, hyperHTML won't do anything 'cause it's full of algorithm and smart decisions, all described in the documentation, to obtain best performance out of its abstraction.
All these things, and much more, normalized for any browser out there, makes hyperHTML weight roughly 7K once minified and gzipped, bit it also offers:
Custom Elements like hooks through onconnected/disconnected listeners
lightweight components through hyperHTML.Component
SVG manipulation as content or via wire
easy Custom Elements definition through HyperHTMLElement class
As summary, if you need these simplifications and you don't want to reinvent the wheel, I suggest you give it a better try.
If you instead are just trying to understand how it works, there's no need to assume anything because the project is fully open source.
So far, all I've read from your questions here and there, is that you just believe to understand how it works so I hope in this reply I've put together all the missing pieces you need to fully understand it.
Do you want to write your own lit/hyperHTML library? Go ahead, feel free to use the domtagger or the domdiff library too, few others are already doing the same.
I would like to append a Binding node to another Binding node without re-rendering the parent node.
Is there a specific way how Binding.scala would handle this?
Bindings can be nested and composed, so in general it's not something you need to think about. A Binding[T] represents an object that is dynamically bound and will be recomputed when any upstream Binding's value changes.
Your question is a bit ambiguous so you may want to clarify or add a code example, but there is nothing extra you need to do to accomplish your goal. Look at the examples and also this section of the README:
https://github.com/ThoughtWorksInc/Binding.scala/blob/11.0.x/README.md#precise-data-binding
Also, I made a quick example of what I'm talking about here:
https://scalafiddle.io/sf/XZgtwHM/1
If you open up your browser console, you'll see that the method that renders out the parent node is only called the first time, but if you click the button more child elements will be appended without the parent node being affected. Inspect the HTML and pay attention to the id of the parent div, it is set up to increment the ID each time it gets rendered, and the id remains as "parent_1" the whole time.
here's my problem, I'm using mootools' Drag&Drop functionalities, it works great but i can't find a way to add new droppable element on the fly since the droppable element are defined when the draggables are.
Their is a method makedraggable that you can use to add draggable element but it has no equivalent for the droppables.
With jQuery, you set the draggable elements on one side and the droppable on the other, so you can do pretty much what you want.
Do you know a way to solve my problem?
in theory, you should be able to push elements to the instance.droppables collection.
var foo = new Drag.Move({
droppables: document.getElements('div.dropHere'),
...
});
foo.droppables.push(document.id('newDropHere'));
// or...
foo.droppables.include(element); // etc. all array/Elements methods.
read https://github.com/mootools/mootools-more/blob/master/Source/Drag/Drag.Move.js
if you want actual help, build an example on tinker.io or jsfiddle.net. if memory serves, this has been asked here before and there had to be some extra work around parsing possible droppables in addition to adding to the Collection.