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This article introduces dojo.cache and presents a technique for externalizing your widget templates in swappable configuration files, where they can be referenced by a custom templateKey widget property.

Introducing dojo.cache

Dojo 1.4 adds a new core utility called dojo.cache. To appreciate it we first have to review how Dijit’s templatePath works. When you define a _Templated widget with a templatePath property, the content from that URL is fetched the first time you instantiate the widget, and made available as a string. All subsequent instances get the cached string. Furthermore, when you run a build, your templatePaths get replaced with templateStrings and their content is inlined into the output from the build. This improves performance considerably by removing those synchronous XHR requests, while remaining transparent to the developer.

dojo.cache generalizes this pattern, making the same functionality available from Dojo Core—synchronous, cached content retrieval that gets inlined during the build. dojo.cache usage is much like dojo.moduleUrl:

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New to Dojo 1.2+ is dojox.html.style. This is a collection of methods which give you the ability to query the stylesheets collection in a document, add and remove rules, and dynamically create new sheets. In this article I’ll explain why and where this is of use, and walk through a split-panel demo that uses dynamic stylesheets to size a 2 column layout.

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