regClientScript improvement

There are many times when it is necessary to do extra work to avoid the same script from being included twice. For example, if you have two polls, the first snippet call should register the necessary js library, the second should not. As it is, it is necessary to add a parameter such as &disable_js_libs to many snippets to handle this. It is a small inconvenience, but those ’gotchas’ add unnecessary complexity for beginning users.

Another example is a page that uses MooTools works fine, until you log into the manager and QuickEdit includes MooTools again and breaks the page.

It would be nice if these conflicts were handled automatically. I suggest adding two or three optional arguments to regClientScript and regClientStartupScript. They would look something like this:


So if one script called

and another script called

only the second script would be registered, since it has a higher version number.

For snippets that can be included multiple times in the same page, just using

Would only register the script the first time, not multiple times. That would be very nice.

One more feature:

would register the 2.2.1 version as a STARTUP script (if any of the calls are for a startup script, the selected version will be put in the head of the document).

What do you think of this idea? I don’t think it would be very hard to write the code for it.

That sounds like a good addition. Care to take a stab at some code and post it over in JIRA?

I actually have an idea on how to implement this without adding a bunch of specific parameters and without breaking compatibility with existing calls, and I’d like to have this change made in parallel in both Evo and Revo. Basically, we will convert the existing plaintext parameter to an options parameter that accepts an array of named options matching the new parameters suggested by rfoster, and if a boolean value is encountered, it will simply convert that to an array with a plaintext element. This will also preserve the plaintext functionality and allow additional features down the road without having to modify the method signature at all.

Sure. I’ll make it according to those specifications.

Code for Evolution attached to MODX-898

It seems to work fine, but someone should look at it to see if it can be optimized for better speed.

Thank you Mr. Foster.

I actually think my code is a bit of an overkill, as it handles some cases that will rarely happen. Speed is probably more important than handling rare situations.

Anything new about this subject ? Is it coming soon ? Like in Revolution 2.1 ?

Revo implements has a minimal implementation that is less complicated than I originally proposed. It just keeps track of any js/css that is added via regClientScript, regClientStartupScript, and regClientCSS and doesn’t bother the add the script if it is an exact match of something already added.

In some cases, this could be a problem--for example if one snippet adds a js lib in the footer and later another snippet adds it to the head, it will only end up in the footer IF the urls to the js lib are identical. In most cases the urls will be different, so it will work as it always has, and include both.

It doesn’t really solve the matter then.

I really liked the proposition above on which i would add one additional parameter to handle dependancies.
That would be welcome for third party components, or even manager UI where one could be able to load a selection of ext components instead of the whole MODExt package...