Need ability to treat controller like template widget about dojox_application

[cjolif]

This is feasible by making sure the _TemplatedMixin that is used to load the view template is mixed into the view itself.

See a working tentative here: https://github.com/cjolif/dojox_application/commit/4a73a00d66174290a7e689e0039bf87f451bb12a

There might be cleaner way to achieve that though.

[dmachi]

This used to be available as part of each view template I thought, but the mixins may have changed a little bit. The view classes can really do whatever is desired in this regard, so if someone extends a view and mixes in the appropriate templatedMixin logic, it should work fine. All that said, we should be careful about doing or encouraging more connections/events like this than are necessary. The convience tends to lead to too much work that could often be accomplished by less with event bubbling.

[cjolif]

@dmachi this is indeed available part of the templating mechanism. But as of today the _TemplatedMixin instance is not mixed into the view and thus this is not working because it can't call the methods defined on the view. Even if I agree with you that this convenience might not always be good to use, I think it does have value in some cases? And as we are pretty close to getting it done, I think it would be worthwhile having it? If you agree I will work on a pull request that implements this (something probably very similar to the first draft I've linked above).

[eric-wang]

In dojox.app, it's recommend to use two ways to bind events:

1. in view level, it's better to bind event by dojo.connect or dojo.on in the view's init(), and disconnect the event in view's destroy()
2. in application level, it's better to create a controller to implement dojox.app.Controller and use the controller to bind events. for example:
   events = {
   "#buttonId :click": clickHandler,
   "div > .selected : click": selectedHandler
   };

in dojox.app.View class, render() method is independent on dojo, the widget created from template HTML should be a child of view, not mixin to view. view should be an object, not a widget. If the template is a jQuery HTML template, how to mixin the Jquery widget to view?

[cjolif]

To answer:

in dojox.app.View class, render() method is independent on dojo, the widget created from template HTML should be
a child of view, not mixin to view. view should be an object, not a widget. If the template is a jQuery HTML template,
how to mixin the Jquery widget to view?

I agree. And actually what I'm mixing into the View is not a widget (_WidgetBase) this is a _TemplatedMixin "only"? But I agree there might be cleaner way to achieve that (see my initial comment). Do you have suggestions? Maybe a Dojo-specific View? But then how would it be triggered? I don't think the current mechanism allows one to extend View and plug his extension in?

[dmachi]

View should be an instance of an object. It could simply generate html or it could render a template and attach functionality to that block of html. However, this is really at the conceptual level. We should make sure we don't depend on a dojox.app.View being there (or something extending that), but in practice most of our stuff probably will.

The template html for a view is not itself a widget, it is simply html that gets processed and placed by whatever view function is initializing it. This of course is free to ignore dojo, _Widgetbase, etc. However, for our views that use templates (most of them) I would expect to use _WidgetBase and _TemplatedMixin as base classes for the view. That is the "view" becomes a single dojo widget with the optional template being the content of that widget. If one were to include a jquery widget, it would either be a child of the view 'widget' (placed inside that view widgets html) or one could implement a View class with jquery itself.

All of this allows the simplest case to simply be a function or more complex objects like our view widget.

[cjolif]

As of today I'm afraid we rely on View being here. But you are right we should probably make sure this is not the case anymore longer term. The Load controller should be more flexible and be able to load something else than the predefined View object.

I will try to work on a pull request with that in mind.