Other UI Components

[mleising]

I would like to create a prototype of an application using Laszlo, but I need a Tree Control and a Rich Text Field (a field which allows the user to set bolding, italic, fonts, etc.), but it appears that the first release does not have these components. Is this something that may be coming in the future or is there something available that we've missed?

[antun]

Laszlo does not ship with a tree component. However it is pretty easy to make your own components. There was some talk on that here:

http://www.laszlosystems.com/developers/community/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=252

As for the rich text field... do you mean a field that you can specify a font in when you code the app, or a field that you can change the font style/color/etc. at runtime?

You can change fonts at runtime by including markup tags, for example:


var s = '<font face="serifFont" size="14">Hello</font> there';
myTextField.setText( s );


-Antun

[mleising]

The Rich Textfield component would allow the user to bold, change font, change alignment of the text they entered with in the textfield. Kinda of like a mini Wordpad. Also, I read your postings on the tree component, I will take a look at that. One thing that I noticed when reading those posts, you stated that "Right now we're in the process of redoing all the components from the ground up. They're going to be far more practical and interactive, as well as being skinnable. I'm not sure if a tree component is in that batch.". What effect will this have on applications written using the current release. Will the change be as dramatic as going from the Java AWT to Java Swing? Thanks for the help.

[antun]

I understand what you mean about the Rich Text field component. I don't think we have any plans to add one at the moment.

As for the upcoming components - you should be able to build an app using the existing ones and continue to run that app in the future. In the worst case, you will have to include the old component sets manually using an <include> tag, if the new components share the same tag name.

The problem at the moment is that you can't use a couple of the components in an app, because they have defects associated with them (as in the case of combobox). With respect to this, we are planning to fix the bugs in combobox first, and rewrite it in clean lzx. This is in addition to rewriting the components from scratch as mentioned in the other post.

In short, you should be able to build an app using the existing components, and have it continue to run in a future release.

-Antun