[Seaside] children & egg problem

[Avi Bryant]

On Aug 29, 2004, at 6:48 PM, radoslav hodnicak wrote:

>
> In 2.5, the complete root component with its children must be ready 
> before
> authentication decoration kicks in - but I can't initialize my 
> (non-root)
> components before I know who is logged in. In 2.3 this was not a 
> problem
> because there was no #children. Suggestions?

If nobody's logged in, just return #() from #children, because you know 
nothing will be rendered anyway due to the auth decoration.

> Btw, I don't know where this fascination with wrapping things into 
> other
> things comes from, but do I have to remind you what happened to the
> current VisualWorks UI framework ("Wrapper")?
>
> Right, it's being rewritten ;-)

Rado, don't go anywhere, we need questions like that ;).

But there's no wrapping going on, exactly: the whole point of the 
decoration system is that parents can access children directly without 
worrying whether or not they've been decorated.  This was, in fact, an 
attempt to get *rid* of the wrapping that was happening in 2.3 with, 
eg, #withMessage: and #validateWith:, where you ended up pointing to a 
MessageFrame or ValidationFrame instead of the actual component you 
cared about.  Here, there's a clear separation between wrapper and 
component, and you can usually ignore the wrappers if you want to.  
IIUC, this is closer to Pollock than Wrapper.

Still, I freely admit that 2.5 is more complex than 2.3, and complexity 
is generally a bad thing.  As you find concrete ways in which it gets 
in your way (and there will be more of them, I'm sure), please do let 
me know...

Cheers,
Avi