Re: [pidget-devel] new bindings

[Luke E. <lu...@eh...>]

On Sat, Oct 18, 2003 at 09:51:55PM -0400, David Whittington wrote:
>
> Indeed. We need to be able to retrieve information from widgets after a 
> ... [snip] ...
> assigned to the widget. What do people think? Is it a worthy idea?

I think that's a good idea for assigning names to widgets, but I'm a bit
skeptical about what happens after post.  As far as setting names, it
could be another parameter of the constructor, and at render-time, the
names could get concatinated together with parent names.  Example:

    $fnEditbox = new pEditbox($form, "FirstName");
    $lnEditbox = new pEditbox($form, "LastName");

That all works fine, I think.  But after the form has been posted, how
do we retrieve the values from $_POST?  They could do it manually, but
that is less than ideal.  I would really like to have an object
interface that gets loaded on form post which contains some easy way to
get the data.  Preferrably without having to know the names of the
widgets themselves.

What I'm thinking is something like this:  At the top of a page that has
some values in the $_POST variable, an object heierarchy will be created
of pData objects.  The pData object would have methods like:
    GetData();
    GetType();
    GetName();
    GetChildren();
This way, to use your example of the contact manager, To fetch
information after a post with two contact widgets on the same page, they
would receive a pData widget heierarchy that would look like this:

    pData[page]
      |
      +-- pData[contact1]
      |    |
      |    +-- pData[firstname]
      |    +-- pData[lastname]
      |    +-- pData[phone]
      |
      +-- pData[contact2]
           |
           +-- pData[firstname]
           +-- pData[lastname]
           +-- pData[phone]

Would something like that work?
Luke
-- 
Luke Ehresman
luke[at]ehresman.org
http://www.luke.ehresman.org