A few issues with 1.1.1

Hi All

I am working with Dojo 1.1.1 (and mostly enjoying it :)

I am adding Dojo 1.1 to Apache Cocoon Forms framework, whereby Users'  
XML Form markup (representing model, binding and template), is  
generically transformed into a dojo-based application. The page sends  
user changes back to the server as XHR Requests, the server updates  
it's Model then sends back any changes inside XHTML 'BrowserUpdate'  
tags, which (matching on IDs) replace that content on the client.

This type of generic development brings a unique set of problems,  
specially as I am stringently avoiding any modification of the dojo  
libraries.

Here are a few issues I have found during my work :

1. API for DND Avatars
I am really struggling to get good avatars for making a DND Repeater  
Widget
(A Repeater in Cocoon is essentially a form widget for editing  
Collections).
RepeaterRows (dojoDndItems) may contain /any/ markup or widgets. We  
have a custom 'creator' function because simply cloning dojo widgets  
in RepeaterRows during DND copy causes problems during the subsequent  
BrowserUpdate.
The specific issue I am reporting is that once my rows contain dojo  
widgets, the avatar begins to look really bad. For instance, I get  
button text but no button, if a row contains a dijit.ToolTip, the  
avatar shows the naked text content of the tooltip etc. etc. I do not  
know how to solve this and I think the problem is compounded by the  
fact that the creator function is sent the innerHTML of the node, not  
the node itself (less scope for a solution).

2. TabContainer absolute height
TabContainer only renders on the page if you give it an absolute  
height. This is a real nuisance for a framework-type development,  
specially as the Tabs implementation we are replacing did not require  
this (along with other Dojo containers like TitlePane etc. which seem  
able to size themselves to their content automatically.)

3. TabContainer @noFormat='true' rendering problems
The limitation in (2) cannot be worked around by specifying  
@noFormat='true' as the tabs are not drawn properly with formatting  
turned off (MacOSX - Safari, Firefox). The active tab has an ugly grey  
line between it and it's content pane.

4. DropDownButton @id
This is probably just a bug, but if you add a custom id attribute to a  
DropDownButton, the id gets added to the pane while the button gets a  
dojo-generated id. This resulted in problems destroying the  
DropDownButton, which went away as soon as I removed the @id.

5. Customising InlineEditBox
I don't like the way that the Save/Cancel controls push the content  
around as they pop up and down, so I made their positioning absolute.  
We had to use fragile CSS rules, dependent on the tag hierarchy to  
achieve this. If the widget and it's button container had CSS classes  
that uniquely identify this widget, it would be far simpler. The  
widget currently uses dijitReset and dijitInline, which is not useful.

Many thanks for your attention.

Any suggestions for workarounds to these issues would be gratefully  
accepted.

regards Jeremy


_______________________________________________
FAQ: http://dojotoolkit.org/support/faq
Book: http://dojotoolkit.org/docs/book
Forums: http://dojotoolkit.org/forum
Dojo-interest@...
http://turtle.dojotoolkit.org/mailman/listinfo/dojo-interest