Book Image

Learning Ext JS

By : Colin Ramsay, Shea Frederick, Steve 'Cutter' Blades
Book Image

Learning Ext JS

By: Colin Ramsay, Shea Frederick, Steve 'Cutter' Blades

Overview of this book

<p>As more and more of our work is done through a web browser, and more businesses build web rather than desktop applications, users want web applications that look and feel like desktop applications. Ext JS is a JavaScript library that makes it (relatively) easy to create desktop-style user interfaces in a web application, including multiple windows, toolbars, drop-down menus, dialog boxes, and much more. Both Commercial and Open Source licenses are available for Ext JS.<br /><br />Ext JS has the unique advantage of being the only client-side UI library that also works as an application development library. Learning Ext JS will help you create rich, dynamic, and AJAX-enabled web applications that look good and perform beyond the expectations of your users.<br /><br />From the building blocks of the application layout, to complex dynamic Grids and Forms, this book will guide you through the basics of using Ext JS, giving you the knowledge required to create rich user experiences beyond typical web interfaces. It will also provide you with the tools you need to use AJAX, by consuming server-side data directly into the many interfaces of the Ext JS component library.</p>
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
15
Index

Load content on menu item click

Lets take our button click and do something more useful with it. For this example, we are going to add a config option to each menu item that will be used to determine what content file to load in the body of our page:

{
xtype: 'tbsplit',
text: 'Help',
menu: [{
text: 'Genre',
helpfile: 'genre',
handler: Movies.showHelp
},{
text: 'Director',
helpfile: 'director',
handler: Movies.showHelp
},{
text: 'Title',
helpfile: 'title',
handler: Movies.showHelp
}]
}

Note the helpfile config option that we have added to each of the menu items config. We have made this config property up so that we have a way to store a variable that is unique to each menu item. This is possible because config properties can be anything we need them to be, and can be created on the fly. In this case, we are using a config property as a variable that holds the name of the file we want to load.

The other new thing...