GXT layoutcontainer drop not possible

[michaelvogt]

Hello.

I try to use GXT with UiBinder. I can drop container Widgets without problems into the layout area on the right hand side of GWT-Designer. Problem is, that I can not drop layouts (like AbsoluteLayout) or Widgets (like Button) into these container Widgets. When mousing over these container Widgets in the layout area, the "not allowed" cursor is shown and clicking does nothing. Any idea why that is that way?

I use gxt-uibinder.jar, which provides a custom parser for UiBinder. So using GXT Widgets inside UIBinder is possible here.

Any idea how to get this working?


Cheers,
Michael

[Eric Clayberg]

GWT Designer does not support this because GWT itself does not yet support custom parsers for UiBinder.

There are some unofficial work arounds available that support this (used by GXT), but we have no plans to support those.

If and when GWT itself adds support for custom parsers, we will add the corresponding support to GWT Designer as well.

Until then, if you want to use GXT and GWT Designer, you would need to use the Java option.

[michaelvogt]

Hello Eric.

Thank you for your response, but I think it missed the point.

As I said, the problem with the custom parser is solved, thanks to the custom parser from here: http://code.google.com/p/gxt-uibinder/. I can use all the Widgets (that I need) from GXT without a problem. So it looks to me, what needs to be done is, that GWT-Designer needs to recognize the container it droped into the layout area as container and allow to drop Widgets into it.

The actual problem is again, that GWT-Designer allows me to open a UiBinder file, and offers me the posibility to drop a layoutcontainer from GXT in the layout area. But then, it does not recognize that this is a layoutcontainer so it does not allow me to drop stuff into it. Sorry, but to me this looks, walks and sounds like a bug. Especially since all the visual GXT Widgets can be used outside of GXT containers. So the general functionality is available - it is even possible to drop ColumConfig's into a Grid.

When I am not mistaken, GWT-Designer is, or will be available as source. So you could even point me to the file that needs to change to make this happen. But your blocking attitude is very unfortunate.

And, when you so absolutely and definitely don't support this, than it would be more helpful to remove the Widgets you don't support in UiBinder from the Panel, so we don't need to be hit by wondering why it does not work.

Thanks,
Michael

[Eric Clayberg]

Blocking attitude, eh? I don't think you realize that you are asking for complex feature and a substantial amount of work that has not been done yet. GXT itself does not provide any design time support for layout managers. In fact, standalone layout managers are not a normal GWT construct to begin with. Supporting them in the Java version of GWT Designer took many months to accomplish. While there is some overlap between the Java and XML versions of GWT Designer, there are are also substantial differences. Doing what you want is not a matter of flipping a switch somewhere. The fact that UiBinder support for GXT is itself based upon two layers of unofficial mods puts it well beyond the realm of what anyone should reasonably expect us to support. When GWT itself officially supports custom ElementParsers, we would consider exploring this further. Until then, I agree with your assessment that those components should not show up on the palette, so we have made sure that they are properly suppressed in the next build.

GWT Designer is not currently open source and we have not announced plans to open source it in the future. If it were open source, I can assure you that it would be a rather large number of files that would need to be changed and/or created to provide proper support for this. If it were open source, I also suspect that we would hand off support for 3rd party components like this to their respective vendors.