[Seaside] Getting more started

[Brian Brown]

Quoting Julian Fitzell <julian at beta4.com>:

> Brian Brown wrote:
> > Thanks for your response before, Avi....
> > 
> > Ok, I have created my own class for playing with and successfully 
> > registered it. I've started playing with the various messages in the 
> > Generator (lists, tables, etc.) and now understand how these work 
> > together... very slick!  =)
> > 

Then I forgot to save my image and lost all that :) I wonder if that happens a 
lot to newbies like myself, or if I am just especially talented ;)


> > Now, let's pretend I want to build an app with 3 "pages" from the user 
> > perspective, with a menu that is context sensitive (indicating which 
> > page you are on). How would I go about architecting this? One component 
> > per page and another one for the menu, rendering the menu component from 
> > each page component? And assuming I wanted each page to have the same 
> > layout, would I create a Class message that has the layout code in it, 
> > or would that be another component? (Or am I missing the boat entirely?)
> 
> You are right that each "page" should (probably) be its own component. 
> And, yes, the menu should be in another.  My inclination would be to 
> have a frame component that rendered the menu and then (based on the 
> current choice) displayed one of your other "pages" as a subcomponent 
> (at the appropriate place in the frame's render method, just tell one of 
> the other components to render itself).

This is exactly the kind of info I am looking for. Thanks!

> 
> When you say you want each page to have the same layout, I'm not sure 
> what you mean.  If they have exactly the same layout with different 
> data, they should be the same component.  Otherwise, you might want to 
> look at sharing the common parts.  You could do (at least) this two 
> ways.  First, by breaking out the unique part into a seperate method so 
> you can subclass several times and change that method in each subclass. 
>   Or, second, build a component for each unique part and embed it into a 
> component (maybe even the main frame) that holds the common surrounding 
> part.

Well, typically many sites have headers, sidebars, menus, content areas, etc... 
a lot of which is common with context dependent data. Like the stuff at the top 
of the Squeak Swiki pages.

> 
> I'm off to bed or I would actually provide examples.  But if you give 
> more detail on what you're looking for we can provide more suggestions. 
>   Take a look at the MultiCounter example to see how embedded components 
> work.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Julian
> 
> 

Thanks a lot!

Brian
> 
> -- 
> julian at beta4.com
> Beta4 Productions (http://www.beta4.com)
> 
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