Adding Content to a Widget outside of Text

[kitsonk]

User Story

As a developer, I may need to add and style non-text content to a widget with said content being just for display purposes, not affecting the function or behaviour of the widget.

Specific Use Case

I want to add a save icon to a button, which is supplied from a FontAwesome stylesheet.

Specific Use Case

Using the @dojo/widget ComboBox, I want to change the down arrow to a plus sign.

[bitpshr]

The current story around this type of component modification isn't great. If a component doesn't explicitly expose a particular piece of its inner content as a property, a consumer can only reliably modify that piece of content through direct component extension. New patterns like offloading most heavy-lifting from the main render method to small helper render methods (#316) will make this type of direct extension easier to swallow across the board.

There's also the possibility of making much better use of the registry available in each component, but this approach is limiting. For example, unless the ComboBox's down arrow is contained within a child component (and not just raw vdom), there wouldn't be any actual component available to stub out using the registry.

I'm not sure there's anything actionable from this discussion beyond #316.

Action items:

• Close this ticket