Posts Tagged ‘dijit’

Styling Dijit Form Elements

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

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Dijit has a tremendous wealth of high quality and feature-rich form elements providing key functionality including validation, time calculation, spinner controls, calendars, and much more. Furthermore, Dijit gives you a set of themes to choose from: Tundra, Soria, Noir, and Nihilo.

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Dijit Diamonds: Focus

Thursday, November 6th, 2008

Lately, a lot has been made of the small and powerful Dojo Base, as a stand-alone JavaScript library that handles the basic needs of most Ajax developers. But recently I’ve been working on a difficult project, and was saved by some brilliant work done in Dijit.

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Creating Dojo Widgets with Inline Templates

Tuesday, June 24th, 2008

I recently came across a situation where I needed to manage a set of nodes and widgets to perform a number of visual operations as well as manage some data between the client and a server back end. While this was a custom operation, it was common to a number of different places within the app. Initially, things were quite simple and I managed with a few functions and connections primarily using dojo.query(). In the end, I ended up with a simple way to make a dijit._Templated widget that uses its source node as a template instead.

Widgets can easily take advantage of existing source nodes to define how they might end up rendering. They might use the source nodes to define a data set. They could be widgets that manage a number of child widgets as is done with the various Dijit Layout widgets. However, under normal circumstances, a widget’s source node is replaced by the nodes generated from its template or the original source nodes are moved to a container node within your template. What we are looking for is a way to define a flyweight widget that can encapsulate behaviors and data, provides for dynamic template generation, and retains the utility of dojoAttachPoints and dojoAttachEvents from the templating system.

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The Devil’s in the Details: Fixing Dojo’s Toolbar Buttons

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

The 1.2 release of the Dojo Toolkit is focused on the overall Look and Feel. Patches have been landing thick and fast to tighten up the visual polish. Most you might be hard-pressed to notice at first glance, but the devil is always in the details, and for a toolkit with the promise and scope of Dojo we have to sweat the small stuff.

Take Dijit’s toolbar buttons. In the editor, you have a row of graphical buttons for bold, italic, etc. For some time the rendering in Firefox has been inconsistent with the other browsers – there’s some extra space around the buttons. The result is that the toolbar is a little wider, and it’s just not tight.

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Usable directory listings with a little Dojo

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

I think we’ve all seen Apache directory listings? They are a list of links + icons that detail the contents of the directory. You can go wild with a custom handler to format directory listing requests however you want. But for most cases they work just fine out of the box. They are kind of tedious to browse through though: scroll, scroll, click, or – worse – tab, tab, tab (tab, tab,) enter. A little Dojo magic might go a long way here.

This tutorial shows you how to upgrade those plain vanilla pages to make getting around a little faster and along the way introduce you to some of the most useful bits of Dojo, and practical techniques for working with them. We’ll touch on: dojo.query, dojo.data, the dojo parser and dijit (specifically the FilteringSelect widget.)

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