Book Image

Building UIs with Wijmo

By : Yuguang Zhang
Book Image

Building UIs with Wijmo

By: Yuguang Zhang

Overview of this book

Until recently, writing applications using JavaScript and HTML was difficult, because developers had to make the user interface by themselves; however, this started changing with the introduction of JavaScript libraries such as jQuery, jQuery UI, and KnockoutJS. An extension of jQuery UI, Wijmo adds features and widgets on top of jQuery UI and makes it easier to add user interface widgets to HTML documents. Building UIs with Wijmo gives you a tour of what Wijmo offers at a glance. With code recipes and well-explained examples, you will be able to use Wijmo in no time. The book gives details on options not explained in the documentation and helps you avoid those that don't work. The examples only feature the necessary code, with recommendations and best practices. This book introduces Wijmo, grouping widgets by their common application area or usage. It walks the user through the features of the dialog widget with examples as an introduction to the library. Then, widgets for forms, images, tootips, and other topics are explored. Features only available in the Wijmo dialog widget compared to the jQuery UI widget are thoroughly explained with examples. Common form components such as checkboxes, dropdowns, and inputs have Wijmo counterparts which keep the theme consistent and add functionalities. When Wijmo is used with Knockout, the UI automatically refreshes when the data changes. This book takes it further with WebSockets for two way communication between the server and client. With Building UIs with Wijmo, you will learn all the common web development components in Wijmo. You will get started using Wijmo in no time.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Using the tooltip widget


Browsers, by default, display a textbox or balloon when hovering over image elements that have title attributes. To make these text balloons user friendly, Wijmo's tooltip widget uses JavaScript and CSS to enhance them. By default, Wijmo shows the text in the title attribute of the tooltip elements. Consider a simple example with an input element:

<input title="Instructions for the form go here" type="text" />

Calling $("input[title]").wijtooltip() generates a tooltip that shows when hovering over the element. In addition, the jQuery selector only applies the tooltip on those input elements that have titles. In this section, we explore how to position the tooltip, load AJAX content within it, and change its style.

Positioning the tooltip widget

Wijmo uses jQuery UI's position method which takes four main parameters:

Field

Values

Description

my

left/right/center/top/bottom/center

The position on the element being moved

at

left/right/center/top/bottom...