BP212 The great code giveaway. Dojo Views for Domino, my observations, and the Dojomino View
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Today was a big day in my area of particular interest. Rob Novak and Victor Kranz of Snapps did their annual session on the great code giveaway where this year they exclusively featured dojo. In particular they showed off the domino.view.grid. It is absolutely eerie sometimes how things follow a similar path. We have produced a dojomino.view widget as well, and haven't been ready to pull the covers back on it. In looking at Victor's demo they have so much in common it is almost unbelievable. (Please don't read this the wrong way...these are totally independent efforts...neither have been published prior to this, I've never even met Victor until today).
To give you an idea how similar they are, there is a function in both of our implementations where the user clicks the row in the grid and we want to open the document. We both have a function that gets the unid for the view to pass off to whatever function needs it. In BOTH of our code libraries it was coded as ....model[e.rowIndex].unid. The e.rowIndex part is how you look at the trigger event and it gives you the row id that was clicked on. The .unid part though is amazing. For us both to have gotten there, we both had to decide how were going to add the unid as data to the underlying data model which normally is an array of the column values. In both cases, we decided to create an additional object to pair up with the array object, and to call the object "unid". Now, that is pretty straightforward and you can certainly see that would be a perfectly normal way to do this, but to actually see it...on screen...right in front of you...made chills go down my spine.
Anyway, congratulations to Rob and Victor, I'm really glad to see their work, and to see it validate the approach we have also been taking. Now that the cat's out of the bag, I'll post our version of these widgets over the next few days so that we can initiate a back-and-forth discussion between Victor and I about the choices we made that are DIFFERENT. We've taken some different ideas on the parameters that the developer can supply to the widget...things that both of our implementations can probably benefit from.
For example, we've taken an approach of default behavior for preview and for open document...but that also allow the developer to supply the parameter themselves and supply a custom function if they don't like the default. Victor's exposing the raw onRowClick events and letting the developer supply functions for it at the widget user level by default. There are a number of things liket that.
Both of us are in need of finishing off categorized views and cell editors for "in line editing of the document". Exciting times indeed! And just to be sure nobody misunderstands...I LOVE IT. I think it's great that they've done this and that we are thinking so much in the same direction. Way to go Victor and can't wait to collaborate on some of the futures of this! The Domino community is about to have yet another great set of tools in the Open Source space they can take advantage of for great web apps!
Off to Islands of Adventure!
