Life as a struct: ColdFusion

≡ Tuesday, August 10, 2004

Rich DHTML client

Recently, a lot of effort has been push on the so called Rich Client development which is either implemented as browser plugin like Flash MX, or as desktop application like Flex or Avalon. I wonder if DHTML client development would continue as a consequence. When I came to experiment on Mach-II, the "poor" View support on UI and, especially, form using DHTML really got me thinking. Shall I get into Rich Client development simply because of the View problem? The roadmap on XForms adoption seems like forever, XUL still seems too early to tell, and then I came across CFMX custom tags, cfimport and qForms. The combination leads me to the work of set of UI and form model tags. The result is shown in the code snippet below:


<cfimport taglib="cftaglib/ui/form" prefix="form">
<cfimport taglib="cftaglib/gateway" prefix="gateway">
...



<cfset user = request.event.getArg('user') />
...





<cfset validator = StructNew()>
<cfset validator.usr_uid.validation = "LengthGT">
<cfset validator.usr_uid.condition = "5">
...





<content:markup>
<content:head>



<form:model name="form1">
<form:data objName="user" value="#user#">
</form:model>





<form:controller wddxPacket="true">
<form:controlledItems validator="#validator#">
<form:controlledItem name="usr_hob" validation="NotEmpty" required="false" description="Hobbies">
<form:eventHandler type="onChange" handler="usr_uid" invoke="rmVerifyMemberId()">
<form:bind collectionList="user">
</form:controller>





<gateway:client remoteHandler="mvcClientSample_wdxjs.cfm" onReceiveHandler="alertNonUniqueID">



</content:head>
<body>
<layout:box width="400px" type="blank">


<form:submission action="#cgi.Script_name#?event=editUser">
<form:group name="User Profile">
<form:control type="hidden" name="usr_id">
<form:control label="User name" name="usr_name">
...
</form:group>
<form:control name="action" type="submit" value="submit" id="action">
</form:submission>


</layout:box>

</body>
</content:markup>


As you can see, DHTML is totally encapsulated with tags. Do you see any HTML or Javascript at all? I don't. You may download the set of custom tags and samples here. You may use it in anyway and anyform as you see fit. All the required files and libraries are included in the zip file. Simply extract to your webroot and browse to index.html and see how easy it is to develop Rich DHTML Client.

¶ 9:58 PM comments(25)

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