[Solar-talk] UI Widgets

[Paul M Jones]

On Jul 20, 2006, at 12:34 PM, Rodrigo Moraes wrote:

> On 7/18/06, Paul M Jones wrote:
>> I am interested in this too; as you said earlier, having a set of
>> Solar_View_Helper classes for these kinds of things would be
>> fantastic.  I wouldn't call them "widgets" exactly, but I know what
>> you mean.  (Let's not forget "tables" and "grids".  ;-)
>
> Ok, another name is needed and some concept definitions. From  
> Wikipedia:
>
> Widget: "A widget (or control) is an interface component that a
> computer user interacts with" [...]
>
> Widget toolkits: "Widget toolkits (or GUI toolkits) are sets of basic
> building units for graphical user interfaces."
>
> In Solar words, I think the Widget toolkits are the View helpers.

Yes, this sounds accurate.


> I wonder if widgets need to be separated or
> put under helper folders?

I would think they'd be helpers, the same as any other helper ...  
just with more functionality built in, perhaps as a combination of  
other classes and helpers.


> For example, I need a widget right now - a
> "pagination navbar". There is no pagination library in Solar, so it
> will be a helper that wraps Pear::Pager. Let's see how it can use
> other helpers to be built. Thoughts welcome!

There's no separate Pager class, but paging support is built in to  
Solar_Sql_Select; you can setPaging($num_of_rows) and limitPage 
($page_num) to get a specific page.  Once you build a query with it,  
you can call countPages() to get an array with keys 'count' (number  
of rows total) and 'pages' (count/rows_per_page).  The only thing  
left is to have a helper that shows some nice HREFs; it might take  
$num_pages, $current_page, and a base HREF that gets appended with  
the proper page number in a loop.



--

Paul M. Jones  <http://paul-m-jones.com>

Solar: Simple Object Library and Application Repository
for PHP5.   <http://solarphp.com>

Savant: The simple, elegant, and powerful solution for
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