I was just wondering why no code-behind or helpers were made to work with layouts? I have stuff I want to display in my layouts without having to set it up in a placeholder for every single controller.
I was also wanted to know what is the best way to persist a display-once "success-message" across many pages. For example, a user fills out a form and when it is submitted correctly they are redirected to another page. I want the user to see a success message on that other page. Is there some sort of provision in Zend Framework that makes this easier?
Well for the messages you can use the Flash Messenger helper
As far as setting up the place holders you could use a base controller and set these up in the init method overriding on descendents when necessary.
Related
Does anyone know how I can get the same pop up via a button located on different pages (.JSF)?
That is, there is a button "add file" which then opens a pop up with a form where the user adds information about the file. As the pop up is always the same I was thinking of using declarative components. However, I do not understand how.
You can create a taskflow which will contain your page with upload form, and then reuse it on other pages as af:region. Check out this great post with an example how to do it.
I might think about three different ways to achieve this:
1) As #Pregrad said, you can create a Bounded Task Flow and expose this BTF as region (or dynamic region) in every page you need it as a popUp window (recommended if you are using transactions)
2) You can create page templates, put the af:popUp in them and apply the template for each page (recommended if you already have templates, and you need the popUp for each page on your application)
3) You can put the af:popUp component on each page you need it, and then call it programmatically. This approach may be would give you more control on the popUp behaviour but would require you to handle it manually.
The approach you should use does really depend on your needs.
I'm trying to create subpanel in Account detail view where list of elements is fetched from external REST service.
I know how to define subpanel, but have no idea how to fill it with data from external network source. Was trying to use get_subpanel_data but there I can only change SQL.
Any ideas how can I do this?
When I've done this in the the past, at least with Sugar 6, I opted distinctly not to try to create a true subpanel. The data being loaded is coming from an outside source and is loaded dynamically with the page, so why present it as if it's static data coming from Sugar? Instead, I created a custom Smarty template to use as the footer on the detail page. For such an example, you can check how it works on the Calls Edit View. I think it's the footerTpl parameter in the detailviewdefs.php or editviewdefs.php. I loaded the smarty template by creating a custom detail view for my module, so custom/modules/MyModule/views/view.detail.php - extend the base Detail View class and override the display to feed Smarty new params, then your Smarty template only needs to iterate through and present the data that your view defined.
To be super-hip and abide by MVC, you could even put your custom code into your bean (if it's a custom module) or into a custom controller method, then reference that from the view.detail.php, and still feed it from there to the Smarty template.
Alternatively, you could just load JavaScript into the Smarty template and use the JavaScript to call the third-party service, parse and present it, etc.
I realize this question is a little bit old now however it comes up fairly often so why not provide an answer with a couple possible solutions. I won't get into code but more just into the design theory of how it can work. If someone needs more specific code help then that is another question.
A couple ideas...
As you mentioned you can define a custom Function which will load in Data to the SubPanel from your own SQL Query. That is one method that I just recently got to finally put to use after knowing about it for a good year and a half.
When you go this route, you are restrained to using the Columns in the SubPanel. I assume it is using the actual Metadata files to determine which Field Columns a SubPanel can use so you pretty much need your custom data in a Database table to have the same column names as the fields defined in the SubPanel Metadata.
Obviously this works great in the right situation, however not always and that leads us into the 2nd method I know of.
The other way is pretty much what #Mattew-Poer mentioned in his answer. It means abandoning the SubPanel altogether and instead generating your own HTML. This is by far my favorite and prefered way of doing it and I have been some really custom modules due to this being possible in a custom module! I will show an example below.
(Click HERE to View full size image)
In the screenshot, you can see in this example that I have something looking Similar to a SubPanel however it is not and is much for flexible and easy to customize.
Example, to the far left column in my fake subpanel is image checkboxes. When clicked on, an AJAX request is made to change the Task row Status.
After that, the checkbox image is updated to indicate the new Status state, the Modified DateTime is updated, the Status column has color background SPANS and is also updated with the correct text and background color when the left side checkbox is clicked.
Doing any of this with the standard SubPanels is a complete nightmare and would be difficult to do some of the stuff that you are open to do when you build your own version of a SubPanel.
With that said, I have built an identical clone of the above screenshot using SugarCRM default SubPanels! It was a nightmare. I could easily update the content and HTML in some of the columns. I even had the AJAX click checkbox image to update and do all the other updates I mentioned above. It wasn't too hard and worked fairly good but it had some issues.
When you do inline edit, inline create record, or subpanel paging to load different set of record. You would then lose all the custom HTML formatting that was applied. The reason is, in the SubPanel you are limited to using the After UI load logic hook. So since the "Page" is loaded already, when an AJAX request is made to add/edit the subpanel content or load a new set of items with the paging links. It only loads the SubPanel content on those events and the whole Page content does not reload. Because the logic hook only fires off 1 time after the page loads, this newly loaded subpanel data doe not receive any of your custom HTML formatting.
In my case, this means that nice looking colored background Status spans are lost, the image checkboxes are lost, and some other functionality is lost.
Now to get super technical, I could have gone another 3rd route and instead made new Custom Field Types for each SubPanel filed that I needed to apply custom HTML to. This process is super hard in my experience and in some cases it really isn't the BEST solution.
Because of the reason explained, this is why my new modules use the Custom HTML route to generate my own version of a custom subpanel or whatever Data is needed in my Module pages! So far it is working better than I imagined and has opened doors for me to build custom SugarCRM modules that I previously didn't even realize would be possible to build due to some of the issues I mentioned above. Now I bypass them altogether and open the door to do pretty much anything!
I've got some really cool stuff for SugarCRM in the works right now. If anyone has any questions feel free to ask in a new question or for me personally in a comment here.
I am creating an application and trying to figure out best way to deal with navigation in it. User can choose different view settings (which content to show and options to filter it). Part of settings is stored in backend in user preferences model. Another part is stored in url and managed by router. But there is more settings I want to keep. The reason: I want to be able to refresh content therefore I need to keep settings somewhere, not update content on user actions and forget how I came to this state. My question is: what is the best place for such settings? Collection object? View object? My own controller?
P.S. to make it more clear, I'm working on rss reader application. And I want, for example, to show last week posts from certain feeds which are starred etc.
Save it in the URL. Thats the only place you can really rely on. If you need more then routes use query parameter like in a classic web application and use them in the view.
In GWT, I would like to do something like a form submission that takes me to a new page, with new style sheet and new static elements, and when I get there, be able to extract the values of GWT variables still in GWT. In other words, I want to do most of the form processing on the client side instead of sending it to a servlet to be processed and sent back. Is that possible? Would FormPanel allow me to do that? How do I access the contents of the form fields in GWT on the new page?
I'm not sure I'm getting the right picture here, but I see several possibilities:
Pass the variables in the url like example.com/myform#create/param1/param2 or any other format you want, then read it using the History class
Use something like this - create an iframe from GWT (maybe put it in Lightbox or something similar), populate it the way you want using the current state of the app, and when the user is finished, he'll just close the (Lightbox) frame and get back to the main application
You could also pass around data in a "hidden" way (no visible data in the url or even through POST) using the window.name hack - there's even a sample implementation for GWT to get you started
ATM, I prefer the second option, since it goes best with the whole no refresh, same page, one app, GWT thing :) That is, unless I'm getting the wrong picture and you want to do something else.
GWT is really meant to be used for the whole application, where "pages" are replaced by application state and URL fragments, and "form submission" is replaced by AJAX calls.
If you want to validate form fields, this can easily be done with regular JS or a library like jQuery.
I'm not sure it I get you right either, but for what I'm receiving, having a new page to process the form is not the optimal design. The reason been that you might have to write different GWT app for that which mean overheads, and creating new window (or tab) will move the user's attention away from where they are. Why not using another page WITHIN gwt to process the form with tab panel or hidden panel?
I'm building a Zend-based Web app that will permit third-party extensions.
Essentially, this application's database will have a generic "content store." Extensions are added to render different pieces of content in different ways.
Think of a rich mail store: When the user asks for a "Calendar" item, I instantiate a Calendar class (or something) and ask it to render the item's content. The same database might contain "Mail" items, which are rendered by a different class (or whatever). So I'm basically defining a base class with the needed methods to handle content items, and then add-ins are written which inherit from that to deal with specific item types.
Each of these add-ins may need to access its own View files, since each of them will obviously have a different visual layout.
I can't foresee all the content renderers that might be used; new ones will be "installed" (in some fashion) so that my application knows "when I see content with a database type column of XYZ, I'll call the XYZ thing to render that."
Likely, what will happen is this: User will visit a URL for the application, thus triggering an action within a Controller. That Controller will use a Model method, telling it which specific content item was requested.
From there, either the Model or the Controller (which?) needs to call something (what?) that gets the item from the database (okay, the Model clearly does that) and renders it using some predetermined View. This would be PART of a larger page that might well include several rendered items (as in, a list of content items).
So two questions:
What's the best way to architect this in Zend Framework? I do want these add-ins to inherit from a base renderer class that I provide, because very simple renderers may simply need to call functionality from that base class, rather than having any of their own code (e.g., a "Note" and a "Memo" might well use the simplified rendering functionality from the base renderer class).
What's the best way to "register" these add-ins with my application? An .ini file, perhaps a database table? The goal is simplified installation steps for whoever is operating the application - e.g., editing an .ini file is often easier than manually querying a database, although I could also provide an admin back-end UI for new content renderers to be registered in.
I'd implement the Visitor Pattern for this.
Each third-party extension should implement an interface that you define, so that you know you can call a specific method, say render() on any object that is an instanceof that interface.
Each extension then implements its own rendering. Perhaps it utilizes a View partial in the Zend Framework architecture. Or else perhaps it uses some totally different code to render itself as a PDF or something (maybe each extension needs to be able to override content-type headers?).
As for how to register it, check out the Zend_Application framework for defining resource plugins.