Developer's Guide
As stated in previous sections, widgets are web components that can be
assembled into a unified web console. COSMOS provides a set of
out-of-the-box widgets that are outlined under the Web Component Library
document. It is possible to extend the existing widgets or create new
widgets using the Dojo toolkit. As a result the reader should be
familiar with the Dojo widget library and life cycle of the Dojo
widgets. It is assumed that the reader is familiar with creating and
extending a widget based on the Dojo toolkit programming model.
Let us look at the life cycle of a widget within the COSMOS UI
infrastructure when processing a page template.
- The page template is processed and the COSMOS bootstrapping code is
executed. Within this phase the Dojo and COSMOS javascript files are
imported into the page.
- Next an
org.eclipse.cosmos.provisional.dr.ps.components.utility.UIContext
class is instantiated. The UIContext object provides widget factory
methods and other convenient methods to submit XML HTTP Requests.
- Next the declared
org.eclipse.cosmos.provisional.dr.ps.components.widget.WidgetContainer,
within the page template, are created with their associated
attachPoint names. During creating of the WidgetContainer
object a call is made to the UIContext widget factory method to create and
return all the widgets associated with the attachPoint name.
It should be noted that each widget created via the factory methods will get a
handle to the UIContext object. This allows these widgets to use the
convenient methods provided by the UIContext class. The WidgetContainer
then appends the newly created widget to its root DOM node resulting in the
widget being rendered in the page.
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