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QuickBoxes for Dojo

10 Responses »
Dojo Toolkit

Adding to my mental portfolio is important to me. First came MooTools, then jQuery, and now Dojo. I speak often with Peter Higgins of Dojo fame and decided it was time to step into his world. I chose a simple but useful plugin, QuickBoxes, to port over from MooTools. The following is the result.

The Dojo JavaScript

//safety closure
;(function(d, $){
	//plugin begins
    d.QuickBoxes = function(args, node){
		//scoping
		node = d.byId(node);
		//settings
		var active = 0;
		args.elements = $(args.elements);
		//for every checkbox
		args.elements.forEach(function(el) {
			//connect the MouseDown event
			d.connect(el,'onmousedown',function(ev){
				d.stopEvent(ev);
				active = 1;
				el.checked = !el.checked;
			});
			//connect the MouseEnter event
			d.connect(el,'onmouseenter',function(e){
				if(active == 1) {
					el.checked = ('toggle' == args.mode ? !el.checked : 'check' == args.mode);
				}
			});
			//connect the Click event
			d.connect(el,'onclick',function(e){
				el.checked = !el.checked;
				active = 0;
			});
			//fix the labels
			var label = $('label[for=' + el.getAttribute('id') + ']');
			if(label.length) {
				d.connect(label[0],'onclick',function(e){
					el.checked = !el.checked;
				});
			}
		});
		//add the mouseup event to the Window
		d.connect(d.body(),'mouseup',function(){ active = 0; });
	};	
	//usage
	d.addOnLoad(function(){
		var togglers = new d.QuickBoxes({ elements: '.toggle', mode: 'toggle' });
		var checked = new d.QuickBoxes({ elements: '.checked', mode: 'check' });
		var unchecked = new d.QuickBoxes({ elements: '.unchecked', mode: 'uncheck' });
	});
})(dojo, dojo.query);

If you take a look at the Dojo version and the MooTools version, they're very much the same. Like I've preached with Moo and jQuery, the frameworks all do the same thing but with a different syntax.

A special thanks to Peter Higgins for his help -- in all honestly, I was pretty lost at a few points of this simple plugin. It was good to dabble in Dojo and I look forward to more experimentation.

Discussion

  1. July 15, 2009 @ 7:58 am

    Why are you using dojo instead of the d argument passed to the “safety closure” function?

    In the same way, dojo.query is not used inside the function? Plugin convention?

  2. darkimmortal
    July 15, 2009 @ 8:35 am

    Can’t see this being useful – the concept is completely unintuitive.

  3. July 15, 2009 @ 8:38 am

    Why you do not use dojo widget system, its more powerfull?

  4. July 15, 2009 @ 8:45 am

    This would be better if you triggered the event when the mouse crosses the tag.

  5. July 15, 2009 @ 10:17 am

    @Pierre: I built that off of a plugin template — good point.

    @Darkimmortal: Fair enough.

    @Ignar: I wanted to use “pure” Dojo code for this first one.

    @Matt: Do you mean LABEL?

  6. July 15, 2009 @ 11:02 am

    darn HTML filter.

  7. July 15, 2009 @ 12:35 pm

    Nice and useful – works similarly to my Dojo powered GreaseMonkey script called EasyCheckboxes – http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/48011

  8. July 15, 2009 @ 2:43 pm

    I agree it should be using ‘d’ in all places. In this case can also drop the || create(“div”) part for this progressive case. $ is used twice in the above, so the closure is fine otherwise.

    I agree it should react to dragging over the label. dojo.setSelectable can help there, should be pretty easy.

    @ignar – dijit is probably “too much” for such a simple action (though would benefit from some of the framework design patterns, this is just a simple “plugin” using only Base Dojo, so the overhead is minimal)

    Regards

  9. July 15, 2009 @ 2:49 pm

    I’ve updated the script by changing references to “dojo” to “d”.

  10. June 17, 2010 @ 8:16 am

    Hmmmm…I should really rewrite this.

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