[Chameleon] A new set of Chameleon widgets

[Mike Leahy]

Hello Peter,

Yes, there are likely a number of details related to customization of
the appearance of the widgets, which I'm more than happy to get feedback
on.  Thanks for pointing it out.  I'm pretty sure I neglected to add any
code that would check for the map size through the properties of the cwc
tag in the html template, so you are probably right that it's only
reading it initially from the mapfile.  Similarly, customization other
properties (e.g., zoom box border colour, border width, etc.) through
properties in the cwc tag has not been implemented in most of these
widgets.  My initial goal was to get it working the way I needed for our
application - now that that's done, I'll likely spend a bit of time over
the coming weeks tidying up small details such as this.

I'll put this fix at the top of my list.

Regards,
Mike

Peter Kingsbury wrote:
> I'm interested in checking out what you've done. I applaud your initiative!
> 
> On a side note, I had some problems resizing the map widget, and found
> that it was necessary to change the dimensions inside the chameleon.map
> file in addition to (or perhaps instead of?) the normal widget html code.
> 
> Cheers,
> - Peter
> 
> 
> 
> On 11/22/05, *Mike Leahy* <mgleahy at alumni.uwaterloo.ca
> <mailto:mgleahy at alumni.uwaterloo.ca>> wrote:
> 
>     Hello list,
> 
>     I have been working on a set of custom widgets for Chameleon over the
>     past couple weeks that some users may be interested in trying.  I've
>     made a file and detailed description available at
>     http://gaia.uwaterloo.ca/mgl/.  The zip file that can be downloaded
>     contains all the widgets I have worked on for a project I am currently
>     participating in.  Also included is a sample that should allow you to
>     test them, and some basic setup instructions in a README.txt.  To view a
>     live demo, you can look at http://gaia.uwaterloo.ca/mgl/resizetest2/.
>     You should find the map works relatively well without reloading the
>     page
>     in the browser, and that it will resize to fill the browser window after
>     it is resized.
> 
>     This work is in part a follow-up to the posts I made a couple weeks
>     ago regarding enabling an AJAX-based chameleon interface.  I had been
>     able to make a simple Chameleon application function without reloading
>     the page directly in the browser, but instead loading it through an
>     XMLHttpRequest object in JavaScript, and updating appropriate
>     content in
>     the page.  After doing so, I found that I had trouble when I got to the
>     stage of making elements inside the page more dynamic (i.e., resizing
>     the map widget - which for unclear reasons wouldn't display beyond its
>     original extent).
> 
>     The best/only suggestion that I received regarding that problem was to
>     rewrite the MapDHTML widget so that operations such as clipping the
>     image while panning took place by simply displaying the image inside a
>     div layer with overflow:hidden specified in the style.  I have now done
>     this, but rather than attempting to reverse-engineer the original
>     MapDHTML widget's functionality, I found it simpler to start a new one
>     essentially from scratch. As a result, I had to also rework many other
>     widgets that are required for basic interaction with the map.  The
>     results (as you can see in the demo above) seem to work fairly well so
>     far.  There may be more widgets to come as we continue working on the
>     tool we're developing, but I think what I've finished so far will
>     provide a good start for any users interested in developing Chameleon
>     applications that does not require reloading the page. There are also
>     some fixes/enhancements to tools like the circle or polygon ROIs, which
>     I noticed didn't seem to draw properly in the default versions (is this
>     a known issue?).
> 
>     I hope everybody feels free to try out these widgets, and I look forward
>     to any comments or feedback.
> 
>     Mike
> 
> 
> 
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