Re: [Bojangles-devel] Widget Killing

[Nathan E. <neh...@cs...>]

Wesley Widner wrote:
> I am trying to figure out how to completely remove a widget from the IDE
> (I'm focusing on tying it to the delete menuitem that appears on the
> widgettree menu now) but I can't figure out that exactly gets added.
> Nathan (or anyone else familiar with it) can you tell me how widgets are
> created on the screen and if it would be prudent to include a Suicide()
> method in the Widget class to completely remove any instance of a widget
> (and it's children) from the screen and the dynamically generated XML.

yeah, basically for each widget there are four things that have to be 
removed that i can think of off the top of my head without looking back 
at the code.  basically the 3 elements in the correlation table for each 
widget will need to be removed as well as the Node element in the 
xmlHandler's Document.

items in the correlation table (and the xmlHandler's Node objects) will 
need to be removed using depth first traversal through the XML tree to 
be sure that all sub elements are removed in the correct order.

the correlation table correlates a String path with a TreePath (maybe a 
TreeNode -- i forget without looking) with a Widget object and provides 
overloaded accessor methods to return a Hashtable containing all objects 
defining different aspects of the same widget based on the incoming 
parameter (String, TreeNode, Widget).  This provides for easy access to 
the respective objects for each pane in the IDE (tree, form editor, and 
property list).

> Anything else for the wish-list at the moment?

Sure!  :)  Eventual things that need to be done:

* open ability for an existing project
* a DTD defining valid centrallix apps so that we can run our produced 
XML through a validator to see how we're doing.
* save directly to centrallix using the HTTP's PUT (or maybe use POST) 
functionality
* open directly from centrallix over HTTP
* direct browsing of a centrallix objectsystem so we can know where to 
save to
* an editor (and validator) to allow the user to directly modify the XML 
from within bojangles and see his changes immediately in the IDE (big 
project here)
* a color chooser TableCellRenderer (that displays the color RGB hex 
value) and a color chooser TableCellEditor (that allows for graphically 
choosing the color desired)
* an SQL editor allowing you to optionally browse datasources for 
attributes and so forth

> Can someone give a overview of what would need to be added to include SQL
> functionality. I'm presuming we would need to make connector widgets that
> are invisible (according to the current Centrallix specifications) populated
> with an SQL query... Has anyone looked into this yet? Could someome provide
> me with a copy of kardia.app ported to xml?

I'm not sure what all is going to be involved in that.  I haven't even 
thought about this stuff yet (forms/connectors/objectsource widgets).  I 
think these widgets will be the trickier ones to do.  Shouldn't be too 
bad if we think through everything beforehand.

nre