[ALOY-630] Use base xml files for views

GitHub Issue	n/a
Type	New Feature
Priority	Medium
Status	Open
Resolution	Unresolved
Affected Version/s	n/a
Fix Version/s	n/a
Components	n/a
Labels	Alloy, xml
Reporter	Daniel Sefton
Assignee	Unknown
Created	2013-04-19T17:27:22.000+0000
Updated	2018-03-07T22:26:01.000+0000

Description

Views should be able to include other views as a template and override. In the example below I use the id tag to identify which section to override. a simple example is as follows. base.xml

<Alloy>
  <Window id='win' class="container"  onClose='onClose'>
    <View id="menu" onClick="showhidemenu">
      <Require src="menu_top" id="menucnt"/>
    </View>
    <View id="main">
      <View id="iconBar" width="100%">
         <ImageView id="menubtn" onClick="showhidemenu"></ImageView>
         <Label class="title" id="title">Some title</Label>
      </View>
      <View id="grayLine"></View>			
      <View id="mainList">
         some custom content		
      </View>
    </View>
  </Window>
</Alloy>

mywin.xml

<Extends src='base.xml'/>
<View id="menu" onClick="closeWindow">
      <Require src="menu_new" id="menucnt"/>
</View>
<View id="mainList">
  some new content
</View>

Comments

John C. Bland II 2013-04-19

+1 for the concept. Open to the implementation.
Tony Lukasavage 2013-04-22

Would the views added to the just be appended to its children?
John C. Bland II 2013-04-22

I think a layout system would be better. Extending a view seems it can get a bit confusing. Without layouts, you could easily do something like: Maybe even in the root of it allow you to set the layout: ...
Tony Lukasavage 2013-04-22

John, I'm not sure I'm following. Also, we couldn't use layout since that is already in use by the Titanium API.
John C. Bland II 2013-04-22

No worries on 'layout'. Consider all of that pseudo. One of the best templating engines I've seen is Rails and that's what that comment was loosely based on: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/layouts_and_rendering.html. Basically a way to fill out a custom layout/template then fill it in with views that implement it. It is basically a preference from having dealt with this many days doing interactive and backend work. Extending can get hairy (hence the love of composition of inheritance now-a-days; another story though). :-D Here is another, fuller, example of implementing a template/layout. mytemplate.xml <Window> <View ...> <Require src="menu_new" id="menucnt /> <Yield id="navigation" /> </View> <View> <Yield id="body" /> </View> </Window> someview.xml <View template="mytemplate"> <ContentFor="navigation">  </ContentFor> <ContentFor="body">  </ContentFor> </View>
Mitch Duitz 2013-04-23

Can the also include views, such that if the is not defined the yield would be the default view?
John C. Bland II 2013-04-23

Yep. would be anything not wrapped in a ContentFor. (thx for pointing that out)

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