Comments on: DotNetNuke Widgets Guide (Part 4 of 4)

By: jkergosi

jkergosi — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 00:39:07 +0000

Bump!

By: Kevin McCusker

Kevin McCusker — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 21:10:01 +0000

Nik,

Thank you for documenting the DotNetNuke Widgets. Your blog posts have been a big help in developing some widgets for our portals.

I have a question though! Is it possible for a widget, in the render method, to call a function from a script that is added during the initialization? For example, during the render method, display a dialog window.

By: jkergosi

jkergosi — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 20:23:30 +0000

This is great! I knew that widgets were built into DNN already. Glad to see documentation on it and working demos. I gave a presentation on this at the Dallas DNN Users Group recently and one question arose: How do you persist user setttings?

For example, if a widget allows you to drag an object, how to you save its location? I noticed that Pageflakes.com has widget-specific settings that are persisted in one way or another. Being able to persist settings would be key in the personalization aspects of widgets. Any insights?

Thanks as always.
Jason

By: techbubble

techbubble — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 21:51:10 +0000

@Saludos,

Thanks! Those are two excellent tips. I will make these changes in my code and post updates where appropriate. Appreciate your insights.

By: caroig

caroig — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 00:14:31 +0000

Nik, a couple of observations having hacked around with this for a while:-

You can use something like

var jParams=$(thisWidget._widget).children();

to pull the parameters rather than the childnodes – this overcomes 'false' whitespace nodes.

The $.getScript function does not cache which is a bit a drag for versioned libraries. There is nice article:- http://jamazon.co.uk/web/2008/07/21/jquerygetsc... that suggests an elegant overload.

Saludos

By: techbubble

techbubble — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 07:28:17 +0000

Unfortunately, with the present framework you have to specify a element to replace the element. I use a element in such cases because it is an inline element and it is highly unlikely that (unlike a

) there is a global CSS rule for it to have margins/padding or any other visual attribute that might mess with the page.

Another option is to not call the base render() method and do the work of removing the element yourself:

this._widget.parentNode.removeChild(this._widget);

I think this code will work, but have not tested it.

By: caroig

caroig — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 22:58:24 +0000

Fantastic, I have a working widget!

My widget isn't inserting content on the page, it's modfying content that has already been loaded by another module.
I guess I still have to replace the widget object with an empty div – there's no way to just remove it with the render baseclass.

By: caroig

caroig — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 03:16:39 +0000

Thanks for the pointers. Investigating a little further it looks like Firebug will do what I want soon – http://www.softwareishard.com/blog/firebug/fire...
Unfortunately the beta doesn't seem to behave quite like the documentation, setting the brakpoint on the widget request jumps me into debugging the jQuery library .

By: techbubble

techbubble — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 02:09:58 +0000

You can debug Widget javascript code just like any other JS code. You can use console.log() to log messages to show in FireBug or other add-ons that support the console object. Since Widgets are simply manipulating DOM elements, you can continue to see their effect on the DOM tree. While the HTML source you view in the browser's "View Source" listing will continue to display an element for the Widget, the DOM will accurately reflect the changes made by your code, whether that's adding, removing or changing elements.

If you add a div to the page with an ID of "DebugConsole" you can take advantage of two framework methods for debugging:

$DEBUG(s, overwrite) which will cause the string passed as parameter "s" to be displayed in the DebugConsole div. The second parameter "overwrite" is optional and determines whether the console content should be pre-pended or replaced.

$DEBUGLINE(s, overwrite) is identical except that it appends
to the string you pass.

By: caroig

caroig — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 01:56:48 +0000

I'm use to working client side and don't really know a great deal about the internals of DNN so bear with me. How can I debug my javascript – I guess the widget js code is not going to be visible to Firebug? Can I log warnings/error to the console during the running of the widget code?
Is there a way I can 'see' the widgets childnodes? It doesn't appear to be in the DOM so I'm guessing I can throw my current toolset away.

Thanks

By: techbubble

techbubble — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 00:12:36 +0000

Thanks for the feedback and for pointing out the problem with the links which I have now corrected.

By: caroig

caroig — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 23:04:24 +0000

Excellent, a very useful series of articles.

P.S. The links to the other parts are not working correctly in this page.

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