collective.jsconfiguration 0.1.1

General approach for adding JavaScript configuration (and i18n data) to Plone products

Table of contents

• Introduction

• How it works

  • IJSONDataProvider

  • IDOMDataProvider

  • IJSObjectDataProvider

• Registering a new configuration

• Example application

• Changelog

  • 0.1.1 (2015-08-25)

  • 0.1.0 (2014-05-02)

Introduction

This product is targeted to developer who need to distribute JavaScript configuration data or i18n strings with their Plone products.

Data injected in the page could be taken from whatever server side configuration setting you want but most of the time you want to read application configuration from the Plone registry and translations from page templates.

How it works

A new viewlet will be registered in the HTML head of the site. This viewlet is normally empty and will do nothing until a 3rd party product will register new IJSDataProvider adapters.

There are three subtypes of adapters, choosing one of them depends on what you want to reach in your add-on.

Registering named adapters is recommended, in that way override the registration with a more specific ones will be possible. In the case of IJSObjectDataProvider the name is required because it’s used as name of the defined variable (see below).

IJSONDataProvider

Use it when you want to add new JavaScript data in the form of a JSON template.

The adapter must be a callable object that return a string that could be threat as a JSON string. It will be added to the page in a script of type “text/collective.jsconfiguration.json”.

For example:

<script type="text/collective.jsconfiguration.json"
        id="your_adapter_name_if_any">
    {"foo": ... }
</script>

It’s not a duty of this package telling you how to read the data, but for example you could do something like this:

var configuration = $.parseJSON($('#your_adapter_name_if_any').text());

IDOMDataProvider

Use it when you want to add new JavaScript data in the form of XML nodes.

The adapter must be a callable object that return something you want to be put inside the page. It will be added to the page in a script of type “text/collective.jsconfiguration.xml”.

An example:

<script type="text/collective.jsconfiguration.xml"
        id="your_adapter_name_if_any">
    <foo data-i18n-label1="Benvenuto"
         data-i18n-label2="Questo è un esempio di traduzione">
         ...
    </foo>
</script>

Although there’s no real limitation in using this provider, it has been designed for injecting XML sub-DOM. If the callable use a template to render it’s content you can use a browser view. This can be really useful for internationalization of your JavaScript interface (because you can then rely on Zope i18n support and tools like i18ndude).

Reading the translation string from JavaScript will be really simple:

var label1 = $($('#your_adapter_name_if_any').text()).attr('data-i18n-label1');
var label2 = $($('#your_adapter_name_if_any').text()).attr('data-i18n-label2');

IJSObjectDataProvider

Use it when you want to add new JavaScript data in the form of a plain JavaScript object assigned to a variable. For this reason the data will be used in a standard script tag.

This is very similar to the IJSONDataProvider above (the callable must return a valid JSON string) but with some important differences:

• a name for the adapter is required

• the name of the adapter will be used as variable name to which the data will be assigned

If the name will be dotted, a nested JavaScript objects structure will be created.

An example for an adapter called “foo.bar”:

<script type="text/javascript">
if (typeof foo==='undefined') {
    foo = {};
}

foo.bar = {"baz": "Hello World"};
</script>

While the use of IJSONDataProvider will not include new JavaScript data in the JavaScript global namespace but leave to developer the access to the new data, using IJSObjectDataProvider you are directly adding new data to the JavaScript environment:

alert(foo.bar.baz); // whil be "Hello World"

Registering a new configuration

Whatever is your choice, you simply need to register an adapter that adapts the current context, the request and the current view.

An example:

<adapter
    factory="your.package.adapter.YourXMLAdapter"
    provides="collective.jsconfiguration.interfaces.IDOMDataProvider"
    for="* * *"
    name="your_zml_configuration"
    />

In the example above the configuration will be added to every page of the site.

<adapter
    factory="your.package.adapter.AnotherXMLAdapter"
    provides="collective.jsconfiguration.interfaces.IDOMDataProvider"
    for="Products.CMFPlone.interfaces.siteroot.IPloneSiteRoot
         your.package.browser.interfaces.IYourProductLayer
         your.package.browser.interfaces.IYourSpecialView"
    name="your_zml_configuration"
    />

In the last example another configuration will only added to the site root, only when a 3rd party browser layers is registered (commonly: your add-on product is installed) and only when a specific view is called.

As far as the adapter registration is using the same name of the first example, the last registration will override the first when applicable.

Finally, there’s the adapter class:

class YourXMLAdapter(object):
    implements(IDOMDataProvider)

    def __init__(self, context, request, view):
        self.context = context
        self.request = request
        self.view = view

    def __call__(self):
        ...

When using IJSONDataProvider or IJSObjectDataProvider and you want to directly read data from the Plone registry, you can rely on collective.regjsonify package, that can quickly help you in this task:

from collective.regjsonify.interfaces import IJSONifier
from collective.jsconfiguration.interfaces import IJSONDataProvider
from plone.registry.interfaces import IRegistry
from zope.interface import implements

class YourXMLAdapter(object):
    implements(IJSONDataProvider)

    def __init__(self, context, request, view):
        self.context = context
        self.request = request
        self.view = view

    def __call__(self):
        registry = queryUtility(IRegistry)
        settings = registry.forInterface(IMyRegistrySettings)
        return IJSONifier(settings).json()

Example application

You can find all those features in action in the collective.externalizelink Plone add-on.

Changelog

0.1.1 (2015-08-25)

• IJSONDataProvider was masking HTML like output [keul]

• Tests were broken [keul]

0.1.0 (2014-05-02)

• Initial release