So I am building a complex web app, part of this involves the building of a tools panel.
- The tools panel will be composed of buttons or subpanels.
- Each button should have an action attached - it can either be clicked on or dragged somewhere to provide a function
- Sometimes when a button is clicked on a panel will appear in the toolbar with cool stuff in it :)
- As the app evolves new buttons will appear
- I may want to change the order of the buttons or attach an existing panel to a different button
I want to design this entire app using JQuery MX. The toolbar is the crux of the app and will be coded first and so I aim to use the development of this to learn how to wield my first MVC JQuery app.
Can anyone offer a starting point regarding how to start this kind of beast?
I understand that the controller is the starting point, and is coded as one might a JQuery function but not entirely sure how models and views will work with this in JQuery MX
I actually built a webapp with a toolbar, though not in JavaScript MVC (which I thought was unnecessarily complicated).
Build a config file like
buttonName : actionName. The controller runs through the config file and assigns the action to the button's click event.My toolbar was quite small (ten buttons or so, although they did change), so I kept all the actions in one controller, although each action was only a couple of lines, calling a separate plugin. If you have lots of buttons, you might want to separate out the actions into different controllers.
Then you have a plugin with a set of generic code which handles visual presentation of the toolbar - drop shadows, background-colors, icon management, etc. Just use addClass / removeClass, and style the different button states with CSS. For HTML, I made each button an '' tag, so it degraded gracefully.
Subpanels are just additional functions on the presentation layer.