I'm still learning GWT, yet already have to face some kind of challenge for a work I have to do. Can't show any specific code so I'll try to explain it well.
Here's the situation: A certain class "Navigator" creates and save the Presenter instances of my architecture to allow reusing them. There is a method show() inside that same class that actually displays the view related but that system only works full screen by calling RootPanel.get().
What i'd like to do is showing that presenter instance's view inside of a flex panel element declared in a class myView (related to a class myPresenter) that basically uses Flex Panel to structure it's content.
To make it maybe more clear:
class myView{
...
flexPanel.setWidget(firstWIdget)
flexPanel.setWidget(secondWidget) //secondWidget to be replaced by a "thirdWidget"
...
}
I'd like the secondWidget to be replaced by another one, let's call it thirdWidget, that consists of a specific presenter instance's view.
To resume, I'd like my presenter instance's view to not go full screen but only occupy a certain area of the screen.
The displaying is managed almost entirely programmatically, means very limited use of css files and no use at all of xml ui files.
How can I manage this ?
Thanks
Use a SimplePanel as a container for your views returned by your Navigation class instead of adding them directly to root panel, and use that instance of SimplePanel where ever you want.
My EmberJS app is confusing me a lot at the moment. I have a collection view, that in turn defines an itemViewClass of a custom view I have defined in my code. Something like:
App.CarouselView = Ember.CollectionView.extend({
itemViewClass: App.SlideView.extend(),
});
And this CarouselView is rendered inside a template that has a dynamic segment backing it (I hope this makes sense?) . The controller for these dynamic segment is an array controller because the model for these dynamic segments is a collection :) (more confusion, please let me know)
App.SlidesController = Ember.ArrayController.extend();
By now all of you have figured that I am basically rendering a bunch of slides inside of a carousel. And these are dynamically backed in the collectionView by setting the property
contentBinding:'controller' // property set in CarouselView, controller corresponds to SlidesController
The confusion begins now. I want to add a slide to the existing set of slides. So I provide a button with an action : 'add' target='view'
In the SlidesView,
actions:{
add: function(){
var carouselView = this.get('childViews')[0];
// SlidesView has carouselView and another view as it's child, hence this.get('childViews')[0] is carouselView
var newCard = carouselView.createChildView(App.SlideView.extend());
carouselView.get('childViews').pushObject(newCard);
}
}
The above piece of code sucks and hurts me bad. I want to basically add a new SlideView to my CarouselView collection programmatically upon a button trigger. But apparently Ember recommends that childViews should not be manipulated directly and I ought to instead change the underlying content.
It states in my console.log that manipulating childViews is deprecated etc.
So essentially I need to add something to my content to my SlidesController content ? However, I don't want to add something to the content, this is just a soft add, that is providing the user with a slide so that he may choose to edit or add something if he wants to. He can always discard it. A hard add that will require me to persist the new slide to the DB will come once the user decides to save this information.
I thought that if you registered a view with the IoC container as "Singleton" then the same instance would be reused each time you navigate to it, while registering the view as "Transient" would create a new instance each time you navigate to it. Unless I'm doing something wrong, I've found that the IoC "lifestyle" makes no difference, and it's the IRegionMemberLifetime.KeepAlive property that dictates whether the view is re-used or recreated each time. Is this correct? (I'm using Castle Windsor IoC).
When Prism documentation talks about a view being "deactivated", is this simply the process of hiding the view when it is navigated from? And if KeepAlive=False, does the view get disposed at this point?
What about nested views/regions? If a view contains a region with another view inside of it, and I navigate away from the parent view, do both views get deactivated/destroyed (depending on the value of KeepAlive)? What about ClearChildViewsRegionBehavior - where does this fit into things?
I don't know if this apply to your situation but I implement the interface INavigationAware.
If a view should be reused for every navigation I always return true from the IsNavigationTarget method.
public bool IsNavigationTarget(NavigationContext navigationContext)
{
return true;
}
Say I have a list of Action objects, which corresponds to a Ember model. Each has a few properties (timestamps) and a detail attribute, which can can recursively contain more details (arbitrarily deep nesting). You can think of the details as nested lists.
I want to write a UI that allows easy editing (auto completion of values, easy copy and paste, reorder elements, etc) of the detail for any Action object.
Right now, my DetailView template will recursively render additional DetailViews:
{{#if view.content.hasChildren}}
{{#each child in view.content.children}}
{{#DetailView contentBinding=child}}
{{/each}}
{{#else}}
{{#EditDetailView contentBinding=view.content.value}}
{{/if}}
So each DetailsView corresponds to a node in the Details object tree.
But I am unclear how to add controllers to the mix -- there is additional state I need to store / functionality to implement (e.g., transforming values from the Detail object for display in the DetailsView; handling events for inserting/deleting/reordering elements; changing the structure of the Details tree) that belongs neither in the model nor the view.
Ideally I would have a DetailsController serving as a proxy a Details per DetailsView. Can I dynamically instantiate controllers and set up their contents within a view template? My understanding of the new Ember Router is to setup controllers and outlets in in a given route; however, that doesn't seem to apply here because no routing is being done at all. All suggestions / insight about how to handle recursive controllers / views / routes welcome.
I've taken a look at EmberJS Nested Views and Controllers, but that proposes I have a single ArrayController for all Details, even across Actions ... this would not preserve the tree structure of the nested details either.
I've also looked at Recursive view in handlebars template not working after upgrading to Ember 0.9.6 but the solution doesn't say anything about controllers.
** UPDATE Feb 20, 2013 **
API documentation for the {{control}} helper is now available here. It warns that "The control helper is currently under development and is considered experimental."
To enable it, set ENV.EXPERIMENTAL_CONTROL_HELPER = true before requiring Ember.
** UPDATE Feb 3, 2013 **
A new helper {{control}} has been added to ember, implementing the Reusable Views proposal. So to have a DetailsController proxy a Details per DetailsView you can just:
{{control 'detail' child}}
See the {{control}} tests for example
Ideally I would have a DetailsController serving as a proxy a Details per DetailsView. Can I dynamically instantiate controllers and set up their contents within a view template?
Typically the way to do this would be via the handlebars {{render}} helper, which renders a template with an appropriate view and controller. Unfortunately you cannot use {{render}} to insert the same template more than once, so it cannot be used within an {{each}} block.
There was a lengthy discussion on the topic recently. See: Non-Singleton Controller Discussion!
Two solutions were proposed. The first involves adding an itemControllerClass property to ArrayController. If this property was set, the ArrayController would automatically wrap new contents in the specified class. This was added to ember a few weeks ago and takes care of most use cases, where you have a flat-list of items and want each to be wrapped in a proxy.
The second proposal, Reusable Views, allows you to provide a controller class to a view.
{{view UI.Calendar dateBinding="post.startDate" controllerClass="App.CalendarController"}}
This would create an instance of App.CalendarController for each UI.Calendar widget, which would be tied to the lifecycle of the widget. As of today this has not been implemented. See {{view}} should have an option to create a controller! for the latest status.
So AFAIK there is not a good way to accomplish this for the use case you outlined. Meantime, binding data to the view:
{{view App.DetailView contentBinding="child"}}
and then having some logic in the view itself seems reasonable. If/when Reusable View support is added to master you can pull that logic up into the controller.
See: https://github.com/emberjs/ember.js/issues/1766
I work in a team of 25 developers. We use ExtJS MVC pattern of Sencha. But we believe that their definition of MVC is misleading. Maybe we might call their MVC an anti-pattern too.
AMAIK, in MVC controller only knows the name or the path of the view, and has no knowledge on the view's internal structure. For example, it's not the responsibility of the controller, whether view renders the list of customers a simple drop down, or an auto-complete.
However, in Ext JS's MVC, controller should know the rendering of view's elements, because controller hooks into those elements, and listens to their events. This means that if an element of the view change (for example a button become a link), then the relevant selector in the controller should change too. In other words, controller is tightly-coupled to the internal structure of the view.
Is this reason acceptable to denounce Ext JS's MVC as anti-pattern? Are we right that controllers are coupled to views?
UPDATE (March 2015): Ext 5.0 introduced ViewControllers that should address most of the concerns discussed in this thread. Advantages:
Better/enforced scope around component references inside the ViewController
Easier to encapsulate view-specific logic separately from application flow-control logic
ViewController lifecycle managed by the framework along with the view it's associated with
Ext 5 still offers the existing Ext.app.Controller class, to keep things backwards-compatible, and to give more flexibility for how to structure your application.
Original answer:
in Ext JS's MVC, controller should know the rendering of view's elements, because controller hooks into those elements, and listens to their events. This means that if an element of the view change (for example a button become a link), then the relevant selector in the controller should change too. In other words, controller is tightly-coupled to the internal structure of the view.
I actually agree that in most cases this is not the best choice for the exact reasons you cite, and it's unfortunate that most of the examples that ship with Ext and Touch demonstrate refs and control functions that are often defined using selectors that violate view encapsulation. However, this is not a requirement of MVC -- it's just how the examples have been implemented, and it's easy to avoid.
BTW, I think it definitely can make sense to differentiate controller styles between true application controllers (control app flow and shared business logic, should be totally uncoupled from views -- these are what you're referring to), and view controllers (control/event logic specific to a view, tightly-coupled by design). Example of the latter would be logic to coordinate between widgets within a view, totally internally to that view. This is a common use case, and coupling a view-controller to its view is not an issue -- it's simply a code management strategy to keep the view class as dumb as possible.
The problem is that in most documented examples, every controller simply references whatever it wants to, and that's not a great pattern. However, this is NOT a requirement of Ext's MVC implementation -- it is simply a (lazy?) convention used in their examples. It's quite simple (and I would argue advisable) to instead have your view classes define their own custom getters and events for anything that should be exposed to application controllers. The refs config is just a shorthand -- you can always call something like myView.getSomeReference() yourself, and allow the view to dictate what gets returned. Instead of this.control('some > view > widget') just define a custom event on the view and do this.control('myevent') when that widget does something the controller needs to know about. Easy as that.
The drawback is that this approach requires a little more code, and for simple cases (like examples) it can be overkill. But I agree that for real applications, or any shared development, it's a much better approach.
So yes, binding app-level controllers to internal view controls is, in itself, an anti-pattern. But Ext's MVC does not require it, and it's very simple to avoid doing it yourself.
I use ExtJS 4's MVC everyday. Rather than spaghetti code, I have an elegant MVC app that has tightly defined separation of concens and is ridiculously simple to maintain and extend. Maybe your implementation needs to be tweaked a bit to take full advantage of what the MVC approach offers.
Of course the controllers are bound to the views in some way. You need to target exactly which elements in your views you want to listen to.
eg: listen to that button clicks or to that form element change or to that custom component/event.
The goal of MVC is components decoupling and reusability and the Sencha MVC is awesome for that. As #bmoeskau says, you have to be careful in separation of the view controllers (builtin for the view/widgets itself) and the application controllers (top level views manipulations) to take full advantage of the MVC pattern. And this is something not obvious when your read http://docs.sencha.com/ext-js/4-1/#!/guide/application_architecture. Refactor your MVC approach, create different controllers, create custom component, and embrace the full ExtJS MVC architecture to take advantage of it.
There's still a slight problem in Sencha approach IMHO, the MVC refs system doesnt really work when you have multiple instances of the same views in an Application. eg: if you have a TabPanel with multiple instances of the same Component, the refs system is broken as it will always target the first element found in the DOM... There are workarounds and a project trying to fix that but i hope this will be adressed soon.
I'm currently undergoing the Fast Track to ExtJS 4 from Sencha Training. I have a strong background in ExtJS (since ExtJS 2.0) and was very curious to see how the MVC was implemented in ExtJS 4.
Now, previously, the way I would simulate kind of a Controller, would be to delegate that responsibility to the Main Container. Imagine the following example in ExtJS 3:
Ext.ns('Test');
Test.MainPanel = Ext.extend(Ext.Container, {
initComponent : function() {
this.panel1 = new Test.Panel1({
listeners: {
firstButtonPressed: function(){
this.panel2.addSomething();
},
scope: this
}
});
this.panel2 = new Test.Panel2();
this.items = [this.panel1,this.panel2];
Test.MainPanel.superclass.initComponent.call(this);
}
});
Test.Panel1 = Ext.extend(Ext.Panel, {
initComponent : function() {
this.addEvents('firstButtonPressed');
this.tbar = new Ext.Toolbar({
items: [{
text: 'First Button',
handler: function(){
this.fireEvent('firstButtonPressed');
}
}]
});
Text.Panel1.superclass.initComponent.call(this);
}
});
Test.Panel2 = Ext.extend(Ext.Panel, {
initComponent : function() {
this.items = [new Ext.form.Label('test Label')]
Test.Panel2.superclass.initComponent.call(this);
},
addSomething: function(){
alert('add something reached')
}
});
As you can see, my MainPanel is (besides the fact that is holding both panels) also delegating events and thus creating a communication between the two components, so simulating sort of Controller.
In ExtJS 4 there is MVC directly implemented in it. What really striked me was that the way the Controller actually fetches the components is through QuerySelector which in my opinion is very prone to error. Let's see:
Ext.define('MyApp.controller.Earmarks', {
extend:'Ext.app.Controller',
views:['earmark.Chart'],
init:function () {
this.control({
'earmarkchart > toolbar > button':{
click:this.onChartSelect
},
'earmarkchart tool[type=gear]':{
click:this.selectChart
}
});
}
});
So as we can see here, the way the Controller is aware of the earmarkchart button and tool is through selectors. Let's imagine now that I am changing the layout in my earmarkchart and I actually move the button outside of the toolbar. All of a sudden my application is broken, because I always need to be aware that changing the layout might have impact on the Controller associated with it.
One might say that I can then use itemId instead, but again I need to be aware if I delete a component I will need to scatter to find if there is any hidden reference in my Controllers for that itemId, and also the fact that I cannot have the same itemId per parent Component, so if I have an itemId called 'testId' in a Panel1 and the same in a Grid1 then I would still need to select if I want the itemId from Panel1 or from the Grid1.
I understand that the Query is very powerful because it gives you a lot of flexibility, but that flexibility comes at a very high price in my opinion, and if I have a team of 5 people developing User Interfaces and I need to explain this concepts I will put my hands on the fire that they will make tons of mistakes because of the points I referenced before.
What's your overall opinion on this? Would it be easier to just somehow communicate with events? Meaning if my Controller is actually aware of what views he's expecting events, then one could just fire an event dosomethingController and the associated Controller would get it, instead of all this Query problem.
I think if you use the Sencha Architect to produce the Views then Inherit from that View to create Your own View.
Now this View Can be responsible to hook up to any events and raise meaningful events.
This is just a thought...
//Designer Generated
Ext.define('MyApp.view.MainView', {
extend: 'Ext.grid.GridPanel',
alias: 'widget.mainview',
initComponent: function() {
}
});
//Your View Decorator
Ext.define('MyApp.view.MainView', {
extend: 'MyApp.view.MainViewEx',
alias: 'widget.mainviewex',
initComponent: function() {
this.mon(this, 'rowselect', function(){
this.fireEvent('userselected', arguments);
}, this);
}
});
I think there is a pretty bad problem here - its very difficult to shard isolated units within a page.
The approach I'm experimenting with (which makes it somewhat easier to write tests aswell) is to have a vanilla js context object for each page which contains the logic (and has the benefit of being very easy to break up and delegate to different objects). The controllers then basically call methods on the context objects when they receive events and have methods on them for retrieving bits of the view or making changes to the view.
I'm from a wpf background and like to think of the controllers as code-behind files. The dialog between presenter/context and view is a lot chattier than wpf (since you dont have binding + data templating) but its not too bad.
Theres also a further problem I haven't had to solve yet - the use of singletons for controllers causes problems for reuse of UI elements on the same page. That seems like a serious design flaw. The common solution I've seen is (yet again) to pile everything into one file and in this case to ditch the controller altogether. Clearly that's not a good approach as soon as things start to get complicated.
It seems like getting all the state out of the controller should help though and you'd then have a second level of context objects - the top level one would basically just assign a unique id to each view and have a map of context=>view and provide dispatch to the individual context methods - it'd basically be a facade. Then the state for each view would be dealt with in the objects dispatched to. A good example of why statics are evil!