Archive for the ‘Dojo’ Category

Rendering Dojo Stylesheets with a view helper

Tuesday, October 26th, 2010

I’ve been fervently coding Blitzaroo the passed week and I ran into a rather annoying issue when using AJAX with the Zend Framework and Dojo. Take, for example, using AjaxContext to load content for a dijit.layout.TabContainer that houses several dijit.layout.ContentPane(s).

$ajaxContext = $this->_helper->getHelper('AjaxContext');
$ajaxContext->addActionContexts(array(
    'overview' => 'html',
    'events' => 'html',
    'members' => 'html',
    'recruits' => 'html'))->initContext();

Now then, when the getHref() from a ContentPane is called they load the Ajax data which, in this case, happens to be a dojox.grid.DataGrid. The grid renders just fine without Ajax but when Ajax is used ZF fails to load the proper Stylesheets which need to be loaded manually. I thought, no big deal, I’ll just hit up $this->dojo()->{some method to spit out stylesheets} and to my dismay found that the method is protected. Why? I’m not quite sure. I went ahead and wrote a view helper to fix the problem which is merely a copy/paste of the _renderStylesheet() method but without requiring the Dojo container object. If there is another way around the issue I’m all ears!

class My_View_Helper_DojoStylesheets extends Zend_View_Helper_Abstract
{
        public function dojoStylesheets()
        {
                $dojo = $this->view->dojo();
                $isXhtml = $this->view->doctype()->isXhtml();
                
                if ($dojo->useCdn()) {
                        $base = $dojo->getCdnBase() . $dojo->getCdnVersion();
                } else {
                        $base = $dojo->_getLocalRelativePath();
                }
                
                $registeredStylesheets = $dojo->getStylesheetModules();
                foreach ($registeredStylesheets as $stylesheet) {
                        $themeName = substr($stylesheet, strrpos($stylesheet, '.') + 1);
                        $stylesheet = str_replace('.', '/', $stylesheet);
                        $stylesheets[] = $base . '/' . $stylesheet . '/' . $themeName . '.css';
                }
                
                foreach ($dojo->getStylesheets() as $stylesheet) {
                        $stylesheets[] = $stylesheet;
                }
                
                if ($dojo->registerDojoStylesheet()) {
                        $stylesheets[] = $base . '/dojo/resources/dojo.css';
                }
                
                if (empty($stylesheets)) {
                        return '';
                }
                
                array_reverse($stylesheets);
                $style = '';
                
                return $style;
        }
}

Now my {action}.ajax.phtml script is nice and happy.

// call the regular members action page - no need to duplicate code!
echo $this->render('team-manager/members.phtml');

// inlineScript contains all the formatters for the grid
echo $this->inlineScript();

// New view helper to include the data grid CSS files generated by my DataGrid view helper
echo $this->dojoStylesheets();

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

I finally created a Google Code project for all my source code. You can find it at http://bit.ly/bgVXTq.

Creating a fadeOut loader with Dojo

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010
Dojo Toolkit

Image via Wikipedia

Intro

If you’re building a large site and utilizing Dojo you can get pages that are crammed full of widgets, layout containers, dialogs and more. All these useful features give your site a clean and very user-friendly experience. One side-effect, however, is that the HTML/CSS is loaded and then Dojo begins parsing which can cause your page to jump around while each element is rendered. I found this highly annoying so I scoured the web (<3 !) and managed to find a solution. I utilize a #loader div which covers the entire screen and then fade it out using dojo.addOnLoad(). This is extremely simple to implement and should only take a few minutes.

Live Demonstration

Take a peak at the live demonstration of the basic loader (or the fancy loader) to see where we’re headed. If you’re interested in how I got there keep on reading!

The HTML

The HTML consists of a single div located directly under the tag of your page and another for content that will be parsed by Dojo.

I AM SOME CONTENT!

The CSS

CSS stretches the div to the full viewport of the page. I color the #loader the same color as the background of the page I’m loading to give it a nice and smooth transition.


The Script

Even the Dojo code is easy! We tell dojo to manually parse the content div and then we add a fadeOut animation to the #loader div and onComplete set the loader display to none.



Pump it up!

So, we created a loader, and it’s pretty nifty but let’s pump it up a bit by adding a “Loading…” message a la Google’s GMail. First, we need to modify the #loader div to include a #loaderInner which will house our loading message like so:

Loading...
I AM SOME CONTENT!

Next, we tweak the CSS a bit to colorize the loading message, throw in some padding, and give it a bit of flare.

        body {
                background: #fff;
        }

        #content {
                text-align: center;
                width: 100%;
        }

        #loader {
                background: #fff;
                height: 100%;
                left: 0;
                margin: 0;
                padding: 0;
                position: absolute;
                top: 0;
                vertical-align: middle;
                width: 100%;
                z-index: 999;
        }

        #loaderInner {
                -webkit-box-shadow: -1px 1px 5px #888;
                background-color: #FFFFCB;
                color: #c99800;
                display: table;
                font-size: 16px;
                padding: 5px 13px;
                text-align: center;
        }

That’s one sexy loader if I do say so myself – enjoy it!