Implementing Molds

A widget can have several molds. Each mold needs to be placed in an independent JavaScript file. Under a subdirectory named mold. The full path of the directory in this example will be /web/js/com/foo/mold/simple-label.js.

Let us assume we want to generate the following DOM content:

value

Then, the content of simple-label.js will be as follows.

function (out) {
 out.push('<span', this.domAttrs_(), '>', this.getValue(), '</span>');
}

As shown above, the mold is actually a JavaScript method. More precisely, it is a method member of the widget class (the name is assigned by ZK Client Engine automatically), so you can access the widget object by use of this.

The mold method takes an argument named out, which behaves like a writer in Java. The out object at least implements the push and unshift method to write the content to the end or to the beginning. It is by default an array, but the client application might use different kinds of objects.

domAttrs_ is a (protected) method inherited from zk.Widget. It returns all HTML attributes required, such as style, id and so on. You can override it if you want.

If we do not require multiple styles per component we can just implement the redraw method directly.