Dojo: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 14. Layout Widgets

Unfortunately, many web apps consume nontrivial amounts of time implementing and rediscovering CSS shenanigans to achieve layouts that have been realized many times already and that should be a lot easier than they often turn out to be. This chapter introduces the layout dijits, a number of useful containers for creating common layouts in markup. Layout containers allow you to automate incredibly common tasks such as producing a tabbed layout as well as producing arbitrary tiled layouts without resorting to custom CSS for floating content, calculating relative offsets, etc. Unlike the previous chapter on form widgets, this chapter is shorter, much simpler, and more predictable. There are only a handful of layout widgets; all of them have only a few configuration options and very few caveats.

Layout Dijit Commonalities

All layout dijits exist within the dijit.layout namespace and share a small set of baseline features that you should be aware of. In addition to inheriting from _Widget, _Container, and _Contained, they share a few extra commonalities. This section quickly reviews the commonalities, listed in Table 14-1, which are all pretty easy to get your head around.

Table 14-1. Layout dijit common methods

Name	Comment
isLayoutContainer	Returns whether the widget is a layout container.
layout( )	Overridden by widgets to size and position their contents (child widgets). This is called after startup, when the widget's content box is guaranteed to be set, and anytime ...