Monthly Archives: November 2010

Design | Development

Accordion API Redesign

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jQuery UI is undergoing an API redesign which will slim down the size of the API in order to provide a more stable codebase that is easier to learn and use. We’ll be posting the proposed changes over the next few weeks in order to gather feedback from the community. Our goal is to support the old (current) and new (proposed) APIs simultaneously in 1.9 and then remove support for the old APIs in 2.0. This post lists out the details of the proposed changes for the Accordion widget along with the reasoning behind each change.

API Redesign

Remove navigation and navigationFilter option.
The navigation-related options are being removed in favor of setting the active option during initialization. The built-in navigation filter didn’t always make sense and was turned off by default. We plan on adding a demo which shows how to implement the current navigation functionality as well a demo which shows how to use a cookie to store the active panel.

Merge the autoHeight, fillSpace and clearStyle options into a new option called fixedHeight
The autoHeight, fillSpace and clearStyle options all deal with similar issues and therefore cannot be used together. Having three options for the same feature (how tall the panels should be) creates a complex and confusing API. These three options are being replaced by a single boolean option called fixedHeight. When set to true (the default), all panels will have the same height. If the accordion has a height of “auto”, then all panels will be as tall as the tallest panel (equivalent of autoHeight: true). If the accordion has an explicit height, then all panels will be sized based on that height (equivalent of fillSpace: true). When fixedHeight is set to false, no calculations will be done for the height of the panels and they will be sized based on their content (equivalent of clearStyle: true).

Rename icon.headerSelected option to icon.activeHeader
This option is being renamed for consistency both within Accordion (active vs. selected when dealing with the active panel) and within the full jQuery UI suite.

Remove activate method
The activate method will be removed in favor of updating the active option. The inclusion of the activate method doesn’t simplify the use of the accordion and therefore isn’t necessary.

Rename resize method to refresh
This method is being renamed for consistency within the full jQuery UI suite. However, this will continue to only handle size changes for now. We do plan on supporting adding/removing panels in the future.

Rename changestart event to beforeactivate
This event is being renamed for consistency both within Accordion (activate vs. change when dealing with the active panel) and within the full jQuery UI suite.

Rename change event to activate
This event is being renamed for consistency both within Accordion (activate vs. change when dealing with the active panel) and within the full jQuery UI suite.

Add .ui-accordion-heading class
There is currently no class being added to the headings for each panel. This results in the stylesheet using .ui-accordion-header a for styling, which makes adding additional anchors to the headers difficult. To solve this, we will add a class to the first child of each header and use the new class for styling.

Feedback

We’d love to hear your feedback on these changes. We want to make sure we address any issues the community may have before we finalize and implement these changes. If you have any feedback, please post it on the related forum post. Thanks.

Releases

jQuery UI 1.9 Milestone 3 – Spinner

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The third milestone release for jQuery UI 1.9 is out, featuring the new Spinner widget, in active development. It also includes updates to the Tooltip and Menu widgets that we did since our second milestone release.

What’s a Milestone Release?

A milestone release makes it easier to try out the latest development code of jQuery UI without necessarily having to check out code from GitHub.

With a milestone release you can try out new widgets that are pretty far along (though not yet final) and provide feedback based on released code with a specific version number.

Note: the API is subject to change as the code is still under active development.

Spinner

We’d love your feedback on our new Spinner widget, to help ready it for the 1.9 final release. The API is already in good shape, so if you start using it now, migrating to 1.9 final should be really easy.

A spinner is a simple widget that allows users to increment or decrement the current text box value without having to input it manually. Increments do not have to be whole numbers — they can be set to decimal values (0.1) or large increments (5) for each click.

The widget uses the jquery-global plugin for globalization of numbers, including parsing and formatting of decimal numbers and currency values. This gives it several hundred cultures that it can support from the start.

Demo: Currency

Demos

Play with some of the latest demos in the menu branch on our live code view site, view.jqueryui.com:

Download

You can download the jQuery UI 1.9 Milestone 3 – Spinner release as a zip file or via git:

File Downloads

Git

How to Provide Feedback

wiki page

To help with the design and development of the Spinner widget, visit the Spinner page on our Development & Planning wiki.

forum

If the comments section on the wiki page doesn’t provide enough room for your feedback, post to the Developing jQuery UI Forum and tag the post:

How to Contribute Code

If you have code changes for the Spinner, fork jQuery UI on GitHub, commit to the spinner branch, and submit a pull request.

If you’re new to git or GitHub, see our guide: How to submit a fix to jQuery UI – The Easy Way.

Comments

Note: please do NOT use the comments section of this blog post for feedback on the Spinner widget. This discussion should occur on the wiki page and the forum (see How to Provide Feedback, above).

If you have feedback on us doing our third milestone release, feel free to leave a comment below. Thank you.

Releases

jQuery UI 1.8.6

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The sixth maintenance release for jQuery UI 1.8 is out. Along with official support for jQuery 1.4.3, this update brings bug fixes and enhancements for jQuery UI Core, the Widget Factory, the Mouse widget and the Position utility as well as the Accordion, Autocomplete, Button, Datepicker, Dialog, Progressbar, and Tabs widgets. For the full list of changes, see the changelog. You can download it here:

Download

File Downloads

Svn (contains final files as they are in the zip, with @VERSION replaced with 1.8.6, all themes)

Git (contains pre-build files, with @VERSION not yet replaced with 1.8.6, base theme only)

Google Ajax Libraries API (CDN)

Custom Download Builder

New Features

In this release, we’ve added support for jQuery 1.4.3 and IE 9. We’ve also added some new features to all widgets and interactions, which are listed under the Widget Factory below.

Widget Factory

All widgets created through the widget factory now trigger a create event upon creation of each instance. For example, when creating a dialog via $( "#dialog" ).dialog() you can bind to the dialogcreate event or specify a create callback.

You can now specify additional logic for gathering options that should take precedence over default values, but not over options passed on initialization. Prior to this release, the widget factory had built-in support for using the metadata plugin to gather such options. As of 1.8.6, you can now specify whatever logic you want by creating a _getCreateOptions() method in your widget; the default method uses the metadata plugin to maintain backward compatibility.

When setting options via the option method, the full set of options is passed to a new method called _setOptions. The default implementation is to just pass off each individual option to the existing _setOption method. However, you may want to override _setOptions in order to batch the updates. Check out the dialog widget for a nice example of batching updates.

Datepicker

The datepicker widget now has support for two more localizations: Galician and Portuguese.

Progressbar

Progressbar has finally received an update, with the addition of a new callback. There is now a complete event that is triggered when the value reaches the maximum of 100%.

Effects

Color animations now support the borderColor shorthand property for animating all four sides with a single property.

Changelog

See the 1.8.6 Upgrade Guide for a list of changes that may affect you when upgrading from 1.8.5. For full details on what’s included in this release see the 1.8.6 Changelog.

Thanks

Thanks to all who helped with this release, specifically: aebond, Alkarex, AzaToth, bakatron, benjamin.neau, bgrinstead, bjoernhaeuser@gmail.com, boldewyn, burnrbr, can3p, chrisbarr, cim, clewis, Daniel Steigerwald, dejannenov, didroe, Dmitry Petrov, dziastinux, ehynds, enti, ergec, gavtaylor, itpretty, Ján Suchal, jenters, jitter, jmiller, joern.zaefferer, John Firebaugh, Jorge Barreiro, kbwood, kharpoh, Kryal, lfaustino, Lim Chee Aun, m157y, MechanisM, oov, phallstrom, PKBurgess1983, qpi, quaff, reidres, Richard D. Worth, rickgnyc, roncli, Rwhitbeck, Scott González, seb835, squix, stakach, Tanguy, unt01d, vaporetto, watanabe, waveduke, wiibaker, wprice, xirzec.

Comments

Note: please do NOT use the comments section of this blog post for reporting bugs. Bug reports should be filed in the jQuery UI Bug Tracker and support questions should be posted on the jQuery Forum.

If you have feedback on us doing our sixth maintenance release for jQuery UI 1.8, feel free to leave a comment below. Thank you.