Ext widgets

1. Introduction

An add-on library to Wt (wtext) provides additional widgets that are all contained within the Wt::Ext namespace. These widgets are implemented using an open-source third-party JavaScript library, extjs (http://extjs.com/), version 2.0 or higher.

Unlike plain Wt widgets, these widgets require the availability of JavaScript (and a sufficiently recent browser). They do, however, have a polished default look (certainly compared to unstyled plain Wt widgets), and add several new capabilities to Wt:

The functionality of some of these widgets overlaps with existing Wt widgets. Whenever possible, the same API was adopted.

The following table shows corresponding widgets and comments on the resemblance of the APIs.
Wt widgetWt Ext widget Comment
WCalendarCalendar The Wt version is more versatile (for example allows multiple selection, and allows more programmatic control.
WCheckBoxCheckBox Identical API.
WComboBoxComboBox The Ext version adds a number of features that are similar to those provided by Wt's SuggestionPopup, and allows keeping the entire data set at the server.
WDialogDialog Almost identical API. The Ext version manages standard buttons.
WLineEditLineEdit Identical API.
WMessageBoxMessageBox Almost identical API. The Wt is more flexible with respect to buttons, while the Ext version supports prompting for input.
WRadioButtonRadioButton Identical API.

You can freely mix Wt widgets and Ext widgets in your application: Wt widgets containers may contain Ext widgets, and vice-versa. From a programmer perspective, there are no differences for using Wt versus Ext widgets.

2. Deployment notes.

To use Ext widgets, you need to download the Ext JavaScript library (ext-2.x), and deploy the following files to your web server:

The default value for extBaseURL is "ext/". This value may be overridden with any valid URL which points to the directory where these files may be founded, by configuring the extBaseURL property in your Wt configuration file.


Generated on Mon Apr 14 15:15:00 2008 for Wt by doxygen 1.5.3