CFWindow Custom Tag Implementation

The great thing about open source projects is you can get feedback from others and change code based on how you believe it should work. While the current Implementation of the cfwindow custom tag works just fine, something just did not feel right. The first problem, and its a big one, you could only create 1 instance of the window on the screen at any given time. The second problem was I just did no like how the window was created and called. Here is the current flow of the tag and then I will show you what I am going to change it to.

The code below is a basic example that can be found in the download. A quick run down on how the tag works. When you call the tag it will create some JavaScript that will eventually get pushed to the head of the document using cfhead. It will create the includes as well as the window. The first thing i do not like is that the tag creates a method that you will call to show the window. By default the method is openWindow but you could pass in any name you like.

While it was a good stab at first go around I think I cam up with a much better solution. If you have subversion access there is a file called newWindowExample in the trunk that demonstrates the new way of opening a window. The concept is still the same but after taking a closer look at how the cfwindow tag worked I came up with this. If we give the window an id we can solve the mutliple window problem. To also get around this you can push your includes in the same document so I moved those out to another file that you call in the head simply using <ext:include widget="cfwindow"/>. Now instead of calling some method you have the window object so you can just call methods on it like you would in ext. You can call show() to show the window, close() to close the window as well as add your own event listeners. I have also added support for some other attributes that I will talk about in another post once I change everything over.