[Seaside] Menu component - communicating with root component

[Keith Hodges]

Ramon Leon wrote:
>> In migrating a complex Magritte form to use 
>> Magritte-scriptaculous, I successfully wire up the models so 
>> that a change in one select drop down, changes items in other 
>> fields in the same form. The child field which has changed 
>> needs to trigger its form, so that all of changes in all of 
>> the the relevant fields are received by the model, and then 
>> scriptaculous update rendering, of not just its own 
>> component, but one of its parents (at some level). Since it 
>> is the components onChanged: 
>> event and callback: which is triggered when the user has 
>> changed the select box, it is the component which needs to 
>> trigger the form and the update.  But as per usual, the inner 
>> component has no means for dynamically discovering "what is 
>> the form id that I am in", or asking the relevant parent to update.
>>     
>
> Isn't that the whole point of an event based system?  Loosely coupled
> systems are easier to compose into complex scenarios like this without
> becoming bound to one scenario.  Rather than all the children having
> intimate knowledge about how they're hooked together, you make the system
> dead simple, keep all the children totally ignorant, have them just fire
> events, and use the parent as a mediator to coordinate all the necessary
> actions.  
>
> Then all the coupling is in the parent, having references to all its
> children, it is in a perfect position to know in this particular
> scenario/context how the children need to interact, so it subscribes to the
> appropriate events and executes the necessary actions when those events are
> fired.  The child need only trigger an event that something happened,
> nothing more.  I just don't see why you feel the child needs to do more than
> that.
>
> Ramon Leon
> http://onsmalltalk.com
>   
How does the child tell the parent of the event if it doesnt know the 
parent.

Are you suggesting that every child has an announcer, and that the 
parent registers an interest in events happening to the child, when it 
adds the child. The problem I see with that is that it expects all of 
the parents to do the wiring to all of the children, thats a lot of wiring.
And parents are a multitude of generic components such as rendered 
PRPages with an embedded component at some arbitary depth.

Keith