Working with Widgets

Working with Widgets

Layout widgets and the DijitRegistry extension

When creating dgrid instances within Dijit layout widgets, it is recommended to construct these instances with the DijitRegistry extension mixed in. This enables functions like registry.findWidgets (also used by _WidgetBase.getChildren) to report dgrid instances as well.

Note that dgrid components are unable to exist as direct children of Dijit layout widgets, since they do not possess all of the features that Dijit layout widgets generally expect of their children. They can, however, exist as children of ContentPanes.

Destroying rendered widgets

When creating custom renderRow or renderCell functions which populate rows or cells with new Dijit widget instances, it is important to keep in mind that these widgets should ideally be maintained and destroyed when appropriate.

While the first inclination might be to simply handle this in the list or grid component's destroy method, it's important to realize that this will not cover cases where rows are destroyed when scrolled out of view (for components like OnDemandList and OnDemandGrid), resulting in leaked widget references. A more appropriate time to destroy rendered widgets would be in removeRow, which is called whenever a row is undrawn, including scroll operations in on-demand components, as well as when destroy is called.

For example, the dgrid/editor column plugin performs cleanup in this fashion. During initial rendering of an editor widget, a reference to the created widget is stored, which is then accessed and destroyed when removeRow is called:

// add advice for cleaning up widgets in this column
aspect.before(grid, "removeRow", function(rowElement){
    // destroy our widget during the row removal operation
    var cellElement = grid.cell(rowElement, column.id).element,
        widget = (cellElement.contents || cellElement).widget;
    if(widget){ widget.destroyRecursive(); }
});