This is another weekly activity report from the qooxdoo realm. Welcome!

Framework

Mouse Capturing

Last week we talked about how to track the mouse position while the cursor is outside of the browser's view port. Since then we have done some more work to bring our implementation of mouse capturing in line with the native Internet Explorer implementation:

• Bubbling: Captured mouse events are now bubbling.
• Container capture: By default events originating in the capture element are captured and dispatched on the capture element. The Microsoft API features an optional bContainerCapture parameter to turn this off. If the value of this argument is false events originating in a container are not captured by the container.

Unwanted Scrolling

When DOM elements are focused using the DOM focus() function, most browser will scroll the focused element into view. This cannot be easily prevented by static CSS and was an ongoing annoyance. Thanks to the work of Tim Buschtöns from the Eclipse RAP project we now have a way to prevent this kind of scrolling for selected widgets. We have added a disableScrolling method to qx.html.Element, which will block this kind of unwanted scrolling. By default it is active on the application's Root widget and the Desktop widget.

Bugs

Dynamic image switch

One of the latest addition to the trunk was the fix of bug#1909 which prevented application developers from changing the source of an image or the scaling dynamically during run time. This nasty bug was finally fixed and you're now able to use the Image widget without worrying when changing the image type or scaling.

Table

The Table widget can be scrolled using the mouse wheel. On some computers and a combination of FireFox3, scroll wheel speed and the Windows operating system the Table wouldn't scroll at all or jump directly to top or bottom. This week this issue was finally fixed.

API Viewer

The API Viewer got some love, too. We corrected the position of the icons indicating the type of methods and other attributes.

For a complete list of bugs fixed during the last working week, use this bugzilla query.

Generator

Stack Traces

Stack traces are an important aid in debugging, and it was a default behaviour of the generator to print a Python stack trace on exit through a fatal error. And it was nice to have this important information right at hand, when it happens. On the other hand, those stack traces confused people and, more importantly, obscured the error message that follows the stack trace, as they easily become large, unwieldy, and packed with internal details that are really only of significance for the developer. Therefore, we have made printing of stack traces into a command-line option of the generator. If you add -s (--stacktrace) to your generator runs, stack traces will be printed on fatal exits. But the default now is not to print them. The downside is: Whenever you encounter a problem with a premature exit of the tool chain, a common response might be in the future "Please re-run with the -s flag", so be prepared .

File Globs

There is a new section in the manual on using file globs, i.e. meta characters in file path expressions.

Community

HtmlArea: Undo / Redo support in IE

The support for Undo/Redo in IE is now again available in the latest trunk version of the HtmlArea. It was broken with the 0.8 update of HtmlArea due to the inability of IE to cope with DOM changes when the native Undo/Redo commands are used. Now the implementation does not use the native commands anymore and you can again use Undo/Redo capabilities in all browsers.

Simulator Updates

The qooxdoo Selenium user extension's hierarchical element locator qxh will now find child controls as well as child widgets added by the application developer. This is useful when simulating user interaction with a qooxdoo widget such as the ComboBox, which has two child controls, a text field and a button, in addition to any list items added by the developer. Previously, the qxh locator would find the list items but not the child controls, so clicking the button to open the menu or typing in the text field was impossible.
Here's an example of how to select the first entry from a ComboBox menu using the updated qxh locator:

qxselenium.qxClick("qxh=*/qx.ui.form.ComboBox/qx.ui.form.Button");
qxselenium.qxClick("qxh=*/qx.ui.form.ComboBox/child[0]");

Additionally, we've introduced a new locator with the prefix qxhv which works just like the qxh locator, but only considers visible widgets for each step.

RpcConsole Contrib

Christian Boulanger has come up with another nifty contribution: A qooxdoo interface to test RPC back-end services interactively. Here's a first screen shot:

See how you can enter a service, provide request parameters, send the RPC and inspect the response. Many developers working with RPC to communicate with the server will welcome this tool. In his announcement Christian writes that the application

"... allows you to test a backend rpc server. It is a very minimal client for the moment, but more functionality is to come - please let me know what you would like to see implemented. Of course, you can also look at the code and tell me what can be improved"

Especially people using back-ends other than the PHP RPC are invited to test and share their experience.

That's it for this week - see you around next time.