I am having difficulty gleaning how to attach stores to a custom widget publish/subscribe. I am attempting to create a custom widget that redraws a seelct option list based on a data store. *
What I want to do is
* Create a store that sucks info from a JSON store.
* Create a custom widget that creates a form that has a select item that reads the store when it loads the JSON.
* This widget will need to be instantiated at least twice so I want to publish from the store and subscribe from each instance of the widget.
What I think I already understand the subscribe end -- what I don't understand is how to make the store publish its information. All the examples I see work on an Xhr* system, because if I need to render another instance of the widget it seems wasteful to throw another AJAX request out if you have a place to warehouse the data locally.
Any suggestions/links to working demos? I have gone through the store docs and the publish/subscribe stuff but its not "clicking". Thanks in advance, Dave.
*(specifically, I am trying to create a Zend Framework menu system and want to create a widget that has a dropdown menu syatem that reflects the controller/action tree of the zend app. Because I need a form for editing the existing menu items and a form for creating a new menu item, and want to tie both of them into the same data store. However I want the widgets to render before the data comes back from the controller/app JSON info tree.)
No working demo's that I
No working demo's that I know of ... It sounds like you simply want to have a singleton widget that handles communications between a single store and multiple widget instances. Without getting into too many specifics:
1) create the common store
2) have your widgets render
3) connect to the store's onItem (or onComplete) with a function to relay the information to the "widget channel"
and in the widget instance, dojo.subscribe to the singleton id (this.id above) and get the item data for each item automatically.
something like that hopefull will get you going in the right direction.
This kind of communication is cool, so please keep me updated and or ask again for more help. For real-time figuring out, jump in #dojo and we'll work it out.