Access custom widget from nested element in template file (DOJO)

Question

I am having an interesting issue with dijit widgets and widgets inside widgets. I have a custom widget that I created that houses a dijit.dialog with a form. Here is a sample

    <div dojoattachpoint="WorkinProgress">
    <div dojoType="dijit.Dialog" id="formDialog" title="Agent Note" >
<table>
    <tr>
        <td>
            <label for="desc">
                Description:
            </label>
        </td>
        <td>
            <input dojoType="dijit.form.Textarea" style="width:400px" type="text" name="desc" id="desc">
        </td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td align="center" colspan="2">
            <button dojoType="dijit.form.Button" type="submit" dojoattachevent="onclick: createNote >
                SAVE
            </button>
            <button dojoType="dijit.form.Button" type="button" onClick="dijit.byId('formDialog').hide();">
                CLOSE
            </button>
        </td>
    </tr>
</table>

As you can see the dialog is nested inside my WorkInProgress widget. The form in the dialog itself needs to be able to call a function inside the WorkInProgress widget to post the data of the form to a webservice. I have tried using dojoattachevent but have not gotten anywhere. How do I, from the my template file, get access to the parent of the widget the dojo button resides in. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

If you're adding the child widget dynamically, try to use dijit._Widget.placeAt function to include the DOM nodes inside. Apparently, just adding the HTML string to the parent widget only adds the root DOM of the child widget (in your case, the second div). After doing that, you should be able to get the parent info from the dojoAttachPoint, etc.

Answer 2

Why not give the buttons, dialog and outermost widget dojoAttachPoint attributes and then in the postCreate function of your custom widget do something like:

dojo.connect(this.createNoteButton, "onclick", this, this._createNoteHandler);

Then create a function on your custom widget called '_createNoteHandler' and do what you need to do there. The advantages of this approach are that you can use pub/sub rather than dojo.connect for multiple handlers for 1 event, you are in greater control over the interaction, you don't litter your markup with the names of functions that may change (better separation of concerns)...