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

Built-in features

Ext has some very nice built-in features to help complete the spreadsheet-like interface. Columns have a built-in menus that provide access to sorting, displaying, and hiding columns.

Built-in features

Client-side sorting

Unless specified as a server-side (remotely) sorted grid, an Ext grid is able to sort columns on the client side. Server-side sorting should be used if the data is paged, or if the data is in such a format that client-side sorting is not possible. Client-side sorting is quick, easy, and built-in:

{header: 'Tagline', dataIndex: 'tagline', sortable: true}

We can also accomplish this after the grid has been rendered:

var colmodel = grid.getColumnModel();
colmodel.getColumnById('tagline').sortable = true;

Our column model controls the display of columns and column headers. If we grab a reference to the column model by asking for it from the grid, then we can make changes to the columns after it has been rendered. We do this by using the getColumnById...