Where the Widgets’ Things Are

Widgets can be wild if you have never encountered them in their “native” habitat before, but once you’ve learned the knack of assembling them, it becomes quite fun. All you need is a little guidance.

“Where to begin” is a good question to ask yourself before you start. For which the answer you don’t have to pay the steep schooling fees of “learning by your own experience” for, as learning from others’ experience is far more profitable.

In my experience, it was overwhelming in the beginning. You don’t know quite where to focus your attention first to get the most out of it. If you are like me, you’ll be slightly more inclined to be pragmatic and want to learn by examples rather than first following the formal theory. If however you want to get your toes wet real quick, get some direction or you will most likely write dirty code that you will throw away the moment you are done with it. So lets see what we need for our adventurous embarkation.

You need some basic Javascript experience or have at least 1 language under your programming belt. Thats pretty much what is required for a start. That and obviously an idea; it helps if you know what your widget will do, otherwise you’ll just be pecking about senselessly amongst the sea of information.

Now that you have some Javascript savvy and you know what you’d like to craft, you are now going to want the following documentation open for reference:

• Version 1.6 of the Dojo documentation. I strongly recommend you master or bend your brain around dojo.hitch and dojo.partial. This is critical for meaningful event handling and callbacks. dojo.query and all the other basics are required, but demands less ramping up. There are some functional aspects to the toolkit which you might want to understand. So take your time on this bit
• Then you might find the Mendix client-side API vital to your expedition
• Mendix’ Widget XML reference guide for practical examples and how-to documentation
• The Widget XSD is the schema that Mendix uses to validate what you put into a widget’s declaration
• Lastly some example XML schema. Is invaluable to start from some other example.

These are the basic references we’ll need before we touch a bit of code or sort out our tools.

Stay tuned for our next episode on widget development for Mendix.