Re: [Pharo-users] Spec: "pluggable" widgets / label-input layout?

On Dec 20, 2014, at 4:06 AM, Nicolai Hess <nicolaihess@web.de> wrote:

The spec part of your question:

2014-12-20 5:49 GMT+01:00 Daniel Lyons <fusion@storytotell.org <mailto:fusion@storytotell.org>>: Supposing I have a domain model, Activity, which looks like this:

Object subclass: #Activity instanceVariableNames: 'title cost' classVariableNames: '' category: 'PERT'

Then I have the expected accessors for title and cost.

Now the Spec version of this I have looks like this:

SpecEditActivity>>initializePresenter super initializePresenter. titleWidget whenTextChanged: [ :newText | activity title: newText ]. costWidget whenTextChanged: [ :newCost | activity cost: newCost ]

Then on the class side of things, I have this layout:

SpecEditActivity class>>layout <spec> ^ SpecLayout composed newColumn: [ :column | column newRow: [ :row | row add: #titleLabel; add: #titleWidget ]; newRow: [ :row | row add: #costLabel; add: #costWidget ] ]; yourself

I make all the expected "getter" methods.

I can see how to get the model value out: I do something like this:

activityDialog := SpecEditActivity new openDialogWithSpec; yourself. activityDialog model activity

First, please don't add a method #layout on the class side, this conflicts with the notion of "Slots" (bug reported, but it is not fixed yet)

Don't add a method to do the layout or don't name it #layout? The tutorial doesn't say what to name the method, just that it can be named anything using the pragma.

I have two questions about the Spec side of the house:

1. The title/costWidget whenTextChanged: stuff. With Polymorph, I can just say, here's an object, here's the getter/setter, deal with it. Does Spec have anything like this, or do you have to do this manual data shuffling? Is there an example I can learn from?

If you just want to show an edit dialog, I would separate the Acitivty-Model (two textfields) from your domain model "Activity". Then you don't need this "whenTextChanged". This is only needed if other elements from the model depend on the textfield content.

Now you can use spec to only show a dialog and after closing this dialog you can retrieve the values with

activitiy title: theDialogModel titleWidget text activity cost: theDialogModel costWidget text ....

OK, but two questions: 1. How do I know when the dialog is finished? 2. That's going to be a lot of manual copying compared to the Polymorph version. Is that just life or are there "pluggable" widgets that will talk to my model directly?

2. This layout is a bit on the ugly side. I looked at the examples and saw usage of the expert layout with asking how tall a line is. Is that the best that can be done, or is there something more like Polymorph's label layout that can be used instead?

you can define the hight of the rows based on the inputfield default height (based on the current theme) (ComposableModel class >>#defaultInputHeight

Take a look at Komitters CredentialEditor

Thanks!

Thanks for your time and patience!

— Daniel Lyons

— Daniel Lyons