Book Image

Moodle JavaScript Cookbook

Book Image

Moodle JavaScript Cookbook

Overview of this book

Moodle is the best e-learning solution on the block and is revolutionizing courses on the Web. Using JavaScript in Moodle is very useful to administrators and dynamic developers as it uses built-in libraries to provide the modern and dynamic experience that is expected by web users today.The Moodle JavaScript Cookbook will take you through the basics of combining Moodle with JavaScript and its various libraries and explain how JavaScript can be used along with Moodle. It will explain how to integrate Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI) with Moodle. YUI will be the main focus of the book, and is the key to implementing modern, dynamic feature-rich interfaces to help your users get a more satisfying and productive Moodle experience. It will enable you to add effects, make forms more responsive, use AJAX and animation, all to create a richer user experience. You will be able to work through a range of YUI features, such as pulling in and displaying information from other websites, enhancing existing UI elements to make users' lives easier, and even how to add animation to your pages for a nice finishing touch.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Moodle JavaScript Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Introduction


Database driven applications, such as Moodle, require efficient methods of displaying data to users (for example, a table of assignment grades or other recent user activity). This typically takes the form of an HTML table, the familiar grid of columns and rows in the style of a spreadsheet. Though generated dynamically from a database on the server, by the time these tables are rendered to the browser they are fairly static, representing a non-interactive grid of data on screen.

There is a lot of scope within JavaScript (and the YUI) for us to bring these static tables to life by enabling functionality more reminiscent of a spreadsheet application than a basic web page. Examples of this functionality include the following:

  • Sorting: The ability to sort columns alphabetically or numerically in ascending or descending order.

  • Paging: The ability to click through smaller "chunks" of the contents of the table by splitting it up into pages of a certain size. This is a great way to...