I've been working with Zend Framework (using Doctrine as the ORM) for quite a while now, and done a few projects with it.
In a few upcoming projects I am requiring the need for widgets similar to how Wordpress does them. You have a post/page, which could look like:
Subscribe to my newsletter:
[subscribe/]
View my events
[events limit=5 sort=date/]
View this page's comments
[comments/]
Where say the subscribe widget would be replaced with Blog::subscribeWidget, and the events could be replaced with Events::eventsWidget, etc.
Now it has done my head in the past few weeks about how on earth do I do this??? I've come up with the following options:
I could place the widgets within controllers, and then call them like actions. Problem here is that code could be flying between controllers, and I have read this is expensive due to the amount of dispatches.
I could place the widgets as view helpers. So within the view I could have $this->renderPage($Page), which would then attend to all the widgets. Problem here is that what if the widgets need to do some business logic, like for example posting a new comment, that really shouldn't be within the view, should it?
The other option is to place widgets within the model? But then how on earth do they then render content for display?
Extra complications come when:
Say the comments widget would also handle posting, deleting of comments etc.
Say for the events listing, if I want to do an ajax request to the next page of events, using method #2 (view helpers) how would this work?
If I understand you correctly your widgets will need their own action controllers, which is where their logic for fetching data to be displayed, parsing form submissions, etc. should go. The difference between a widget and a page in this case is in how it's rendered, i.e. as an HTML fragment instead of as a whole page; you can use the Action View Helper to achieve this.
If your widget includes a form it should probably use AJAX to submit the form data back to the server, so that using the widget doesn't cause the user to accidentally navigate away from the page. You can inject the required JavaScript into the page you've included the widget into by using the Head Script Helper in your widget's view and/or action.
I left Richards reply, the problem, and further use cases cook in my brain for a while longer and ended up coming to a solution.
I will have the following view helpers and methods:
Content; with methods: render, renderWidgets, renderWidget, renderCommentsWidget (comments).
Event; with methods: renderEventsWidget (many events), renderEventWidget (one event)
Subscription; with methods: renderSubscribeWidget (subscription form).
I will have inside my configuration file:
app.widgets.comments.helper = content
app.widgets.subscribe.helper = subscription
app.widgets.events.helper = event
I will also have the following models:
Content for use for all pages.
Event for use for all events.
Subcriber for use for subscriptions to content
So inside my view I will do something like this:
echo $this->content()->render($this->Content)
Content::render() will then perform any content rendering and then perform rendering of the widgets by passing along to Content::renderWidgets(). Here we will use the configuration of app.widgets to link together the widget bbcode tag to it's appropriate view helper (using the naming convention 'render'.ucfirst($tag).'Widget'). So for example Content::renderCommentsWidget() would then proceed to render the comments.
Perhaps later on I will decide to have a Widget View Helper, and individual view helpers for each widget eg. ContentCommentsWidget View Helper. But for now that would just add additional unrequired complexity.
Now to answer the AJAX problem I mentioned. Say for the comments widget allowing for comments to be posted via ajax. It would simply have an appropriate method inside the Content Controller for it. So pretty much we also have a Event and Subscription controllers too - corresponding with the view helpers. Interaction between the view helper and controller will all be hard coded, there is no purpose for it to be soft coded.
I hope this helps someone else, and the current plan is to make the project where all this is used to be an open-source project. So maybe one day you can see it all in action.
Thanks.
Update:
You can find the source code of these ideas in action in the following repositories:
BalCMS - this is the actual CMS which contains the widgets in /application/modules/balcms/view/helpers and contains the configuration in /application/modules/config/application/balcms.yaml
BalPHP - this is the resource library which contains the widget view helper at /lib/Bal/View/Helper/Widget.php
Related
experts,
These are two very basic connected questions.
I'm studying SAPUI5 and I cannot find means to position my UI elements on the screen.
In my view.js file I create, let's say, a button, a datepicker and a text field.
If I do something like:
aControls=[];
<Define the button - oButton>
aControls.push(oButton);
<Define the datepicker - oDatePicker>
aControls.push(oDatePicker);
<Define the text field - oText>
aControls.push(oText);
return aControls;
then I get all three elements positioned in a row one right after another.
I cannot use css, because I pass all those objects in one array and all of them are placed into a common div on index.html.
How do I position these? A link to any good tutorial/examples is very welcome.
Also, how do I refresh UI elements?
For example, I have situation, when on button press I make a call to the server, get response and put it into a using something like:
response.placeAt('some-id');
The button is created in the view.js and the call is processed in controller.js.
The response is added every time I press the button and I have no idea how to replace the old response with the new one.
A good link is very welcome.
Thanks.
There are a lot of layout controls of SAPUI5 you can use: Grid, HorizontalLayout, VerticalLayout, MatrixLayout,etc. You can check the examples and see how you need to layout your views.
You are currently doing UI5 JS view which implements createContent method to define views, this is one approach. Another common approach is to use XML views, it is declarative and more straightforward, also needs less code. See this simple example in JSBin of defining XML view and controller to refresh UI.
SAP UI5 is all about Model(JSONModel/ODataModel)-View(JSView/XMLView)-Controller. You are highly recommend to read this MVC example, though it is based on SAP UI5 mobile, the content is relevant to SAP UI5 desktop as well.
Hope you will get some hints.
We've been using the recommended GWT approach of building parts of our application in an MVP manner. The logic we use is based on Google's examples - the Presenter fetches/prepares data and sets it on the View, and the View contains a reference to the Presenter which it calls (e.g. in UiHandlers).
Some parts of the application which we built should be reused in other views. For example - a view which is sometimes the "main view" of a part of the application - can be used inside a pop-up in another part of the application (of course, the views/presenters are initialized differently in this other case, but basically it is the same thing).
What would be the correct approach to do stuff like this? I cannot seem to find a suitable one without resorting to ugly hacky stuff.
For example - if I put the presenter of the reused component inside the main view - it is easy to initialize the reused component, but it is ugly to receive a result back in the main presenter. This can be solved by passing a runnable or creating a custom handler or passing the parent presenter itself to the reused presenter.
All of these approaches don't seem right to me though and seem ugly.
Any ideas/experiences?
What you're describing is a view being able to be controlled by 2 distinct presenters. Abstracting those presenters behind a common API, in the form of an interface, should be enough.
You can also see it as a composite widget being used within two distinct views. The composite widget would then expose events and a public API that both views could wire to their specific presenters.
See Activites and Places,It can help you to desing and structure you app.
https://developers.google.com/web-toolkit/doc/latest/DevGuideMvpActivitiesAndPlaces
.
I`m using asp.net mvc 2.0 and trying to create reusable web site parts, that can be added at any page dynamically.
The problem I have is how to load a partial view with all related js and data? Ive tried the following ways to do that:
Use partial view and put all the js into it. In main view use render partial. But to initialize partial view I need to add model to current action method model to be able to make RenderPartial("MyPartialView", Model.PartialViewModel).
Also I do not have a place to put additional data I need to fill my form(like drop down lists values, some predefined values etc).
Use RenderAction, but it seems it have same problems as RenderPartial, except for I do not need to add anything to any other model.
Any other oprions are greatly appreciated.
As I understand it, RenderAction performs the full pipeline on the action, then renders the result - so what is rendered is the same as what you'd see if you'd browsed to the action.
I've used RenderAction to render 'widgets' throughout a site, but in my view they should be independent of the page rendering them, otherwise they're not really widgets and should be part of the rendering page's code instead. For instance, if there's a log in form, you will always take the user to a page that can process the information, no matter what page they are currently on, so this makes for a good widget. Other ways I've used it is to show a shopping basket or advertising. Neither of which are dependent on the page being shown.
Hope this helps a little!
Lets say that on all my views, or generally at any time in my app, I want to be able to show an error message popup, and it always looks the same. How do I do that?
First thought is having all my view models extend a base view model which facilitates these things, but after that, do I have this base view model actually create the UI widgets and display them?
thanks,
Mark
If you've got some common functionality that you want to provide across a range of views, then you can implement a base class that inherits from the PhoneApplicationPage, and then derive all your classes from that class instead. The XAML for your pages then looks like this:
<local:BasePage xmlns ...
xmlns:local="clr-namespace:MyNamespace"
x:Class="MyNamespace.MyPage">
However, you will not be able to define common UI components in the XAML for your base page. If you wanted to have common UI components you would have create them manually in the code-behind for the base page, perhaps in a handler for the Loaded event, but I think a better solution would be to provide your common UI in a UserControl, which you then add to each of your pages.
If you want to show a Toast or Message Box, then I would recommend the ToastRequestTrigger and MessageBoxRequestTrigger from the Silverlight Toolkit as described in the patterns & practices WP7 Developer Guide.
you could probably define an event on base view model, which is fired inside view model whenever an error occurs, then in view, you can subscribe to this event and display the popup. You can carry error context in EventArgs of the fired event.
Additionally you could unify the logic for displaying the popup but that's probably another story :)
This is testable and nicely decoupled from the view.
Hope this helps,
Robert
Having worked with .net in both winforms and ASP.net for a few years I am now starting to get into MVC (a little late I know). One major confusion for me is the concept of reusable 'components', similar to the concept of a usercontrol in webforms.
For example, I would like to have a number of 'widgets' within the members area of my site, one of which is the details of the logged in users account manager. I can create this as a partial however when the page loads the data needs to be passed in as part of the ViewModel / View Data. I would like to use this widget in a number of different sections which would then mean that I need to put the code to pass the data in into a number of different controllers. This seems to violate the DRY principle, or am I missing something here? I would ideally like everything to be encapsulated within the 1 partial which can then be used in any page.
You can go three ways:
1) For simple controls without much logic, you can create new instance of the custom view model for the control:
Html.RenderPartial("YourControl", new YourControlViewModel () { Param1="value1", Param2 = Model.AnotherValue });
2) If you need some back end logic for the control, you can use
Html.RenderAction("ActionName", "SomeControllerName", RouteValuesDictionary);
It will call standard controller action, use the view, and insert the resulting output back to the page. You can add [ChildActionOnly] atribute to the controller method to ensure that the method will be available only from the Html.RenderPartial. It is slightly violating the MVC principle (view shouldn't call controller), but its great for widgets, and it is used in the Ruby on Rails world without much issues. You can check great article from Haacked
3) Create custom html helper for tasks like custom date formatting, calculating etc..
In your case, I would choose the number two.