[Xerte-dev] Re: How to wait while Xerte populates rootIcon.pages

[Dave Burnett]

What does a wait interaction in the entryframe do?

Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2012 23:06:32 +0100
From: johnathan.kemp at ntlworld.com
To: Xerte-dev at lists.nottingham.ac.uk
Subject: [Xerte-dev] How to wait while Xerte populates rootIcon.pages

Hello everyone - a little puzzle for Easter,


I don't know if anyone can throw any light on this little problem I have hit.
Xerte desktop creates an array rootIcon.pages
By the time a learning object setup script runs rootIcon.pages has not been defined as it has undefined length.
By the time a script off an Entry Frame runs it has length 0, so it has been created but not populated.By the time a script in a page runs its length is the number of pages in the project.

For each entry in the array Xerte will place the details of a page including the extXML data so you can get at the values set in an xwd form for any page in your project. However at the time the first page has loaded only the details of the xml for the first page have loaded. By the time the next page of a project is loaded the array is fully populated.

This effectively means that my Connector pages which use this array for desktop projects (but not for XOt projects) cannot work as the first page of a project, because they cannot look up the pages they are set up to connect to.

However it appears that the loading of the style sheet in my entryFrame's setup script effectively causes the first page to load twice. This is invisible to the end user but any debug statements will be repeated, showing the page loaded twice.

This has the benefit that in Xerte preview mode, or if the published project is viewed in Internet Explorer or Firefox a connector page can operate as the first page of a project, because by the time the page has reloaded the rootIcon.pages array is fully populated.

The twist is I have been trying to use this to make it possible to open a Xerte project at a specific page by adding 
?pageID=myTargetPage 
to the url of an external link to the project. I achieve this by adding some Connector page like code to the title page. A project then uses this form of Title page as the first page of the project.  When the project opens in the browser it opens at the first page and the pageID value if one is passed in the Url gets captured. The Title page then uses the same method as a standard connector page to go to the page specified by the pageID. 

I have this working in Firefox and Internet Explorer. However in Opera the url parameter captures perfectly but for some reason the rootIcon.pages array is still not populated with the extXML data for any of the other pages, so the redirect fails. If I use the Xerte navigation to move to page 2 and then go back to the title page it will redirect to the page specified in the url, so the principle works in Opera.

So is there a way I can force the rootIcon.pages array to fully populate before I move on to compare the url pageID. I tried a while loop but just looping until the array has time to populate does not work. I guess because the array stops populating whilst the loop is running. I am sure this would be a feature many people would find useful, so any ideas as to how I get the page to wait until the array is populated would be much appreciated.

Kind regards
Johnathan





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