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.

Continue reading