Building your First App
Many classes have shortcut names used when creating (instantiating) a class with a
configuration object. The shortcut name is referred to as an alias (or xtype if the
class extends Ext.Component). The alias/xtype is listed next to the class name of
applicable classes for quick reference.
Framework classes or their members may be specified as private or protected. Else,
the class / member is public. Public, protected, and private are access
descriptors used to convey how and when the class or class member should be used.
Public classes and class members are available for use by any other class or application code and may be relied upon as a stable and persistent within major product versions. Public classes and members may safely be extended via a subclass.
Protected class members are stable public members intended to be used by the
owning class or its subclasses. Protected members may safely be extended via a subclass.
Private classes and class members are used internally by the framework and are not intended to be used by application developers. Private classes and members may change or be omitted from the framework at any time without notice and should not be relied upon in application logic.
static label next to the
method name. *See Static below.Below is an example class member that we can disect to show the syntax of a class member (the lookupComponent method as viewed from the Ext.button.Button class in this case).
Let's look at each part of the member row:
lookupComponent in this example)( item ) in this example)Ext.Component in this case). This may be omitted for methods that do not
return anything other than undefined or may display as multiple possible values
separated by a forward slash / signifying that what is returned may depend on the
results of the method call (i.e. a method may return a Component if a get method calls is
successful or false if unsuccessful which would be displayed as
Ext.Component/Boolean).PROTECTED in
this example - see the Flags section below)Ext.container.Container in this example). The source
class will be displayed as a blue link if the member originates from the current class
and gray if it is inherited from an ancestor or mixed-in class.view source in the example)item : Object in the example).undefined a "Returns" section
will note the type of class or object returned and a description (Ext.Component in the
example)Available since 3.4.0 - not pictured in
the example) just after the member descriptionDefaults to: false)The API documentation uses a number of flags to further commnicate the class member's function and intent. The label may be represented by a text label, an abbreviation, or an icon.
classInstance.method1().method2().etc();false is returned from
an event handler- Indicates a framework class
- A singleton framework class. *See the singleton flag for more information
- A component-type framework class (any class within the Ext JS framework that extends Ext.Component)
- Indicates that the class, member, or guide is new in the currently viewed version
- Indicates a class member of type config
- Indicates a class member of type property
- Indicates a class member of type
method
- Indicates a class member of type event
- Indicates a class member of type
theme variable
- Indicates a class member of type
theme mixin
- Indicates that the class, member, or guide is new in the currently viewed version
Just below the class name on an API doc page is a row of buttons corresponding to the types of members owned by the current class. Each button shows a count of members by type (this count is updated as filters are applied). Clicking the button will navigate you to that member section. Hovering over the member-type button will reveal a popup menu of all members of that type for quick navigation.
Getting and setter methods that correlate to a class config option will show up in the methods section as well as in the configs section of both the API doc and the member-type menus just beneath the config they work with. The getter and setter method documentation will be found in the config row for easy reference.
Your page history is kept in localstorage and displayed (using the available real estate) just below the top title bar. By default, the only search results shown are the pages matching the product / version you're currently viewing. You can expand what is displayed by clicking on the button on the right-hand side of the history bar and choosing the "All" radio option. This will show all recent pages in the history bar for all products / versions.
Within the history config menu you will also see a listing of your recent page visits. The results are filtered by the "Current Product / Version" and "All" radio options. Clicking on the button will clear the history bar as well as the history kept in local storage.
If "All" is selected in the history config menu the checkbox option for "Show product details in the history bar" will be enabled. When checked, the product/version for each historic page will show alongside the page name in the history bar. Hovering the cursor over the page names in the history bar will also show the product/version as a tooltip.
Both API docs and guides can be searched for using the search field at the top of the page.
On API doc pages there is also a filter input field that filters the member rows using the filter string. In addition to filtering by string you can filter the class members by access level, inheritance, and read only. This is done using the checkboxes at the top of the page.
The checkbox at the bottom of the API class navigation tree filters the class list to include or exclude private classes.
Clicking on an empty search field will show your last 10 searches for quick navigation.
Each API doc page (with the exception of Javascript primitives pages) has a menu view of metadata relating to that class. This metadata view will have one or more of the following:
Ext.button.Button class has an alternate class name of Ext.Button). Alternate class
names are commonly maintained for backward compatibility.Runnable examples (Fiddles) are expanded on a page by default. You can collapse and expand example code blocks individually using the arrow on the top-left of the code block. You can also toggle the collapse state of all examples using the toggle button on the top-right of the page. The toggle-all state will be remembered between page loads.
Class members are collapsed on a page by default. You can expand and collapse members using the arrow icon on the left of the member row or globally using the expand / collapse all toggle button top-right.
Viewing the docs on narrower screens or browsers will result in a view optimized for a smaller form factor. The primary differences between the desktop and "mobile" view are:
The class source can be viewed by clicking on the class name at the top of an API doc page. The source for class members can be viewed by clicking on the "view source" link on the right-hand side of the member row.
This guide helps you create a first app for a mobile device.
Before starting, please ensure you've installed all of the appropriate software required by Sencha Touch. These requirements are laid out in the Getting Started guide.
Choose or create a directory where your application will reside, change to that directory, and issue the following command:
$ sencha -sdk /path/to/touch generate app MyApp .
Where:
This generates a starting Sencha Touch application namespaced to the MyApp variable
and located in the current directory.
The starting app contains all the files you need to create a Sencha Touch application, including the default index.html file, a copy of the Touch SDK, the CSS file, and images and configuration files for creating native packages for your app.
You can verify if your application has generated successfully by opening it in a
web browser. If you extracted the SDK to your webroot folder,
navigate to http://localhost/MyApp. If you are using the Sencha Cmd web server,
you can access served applications with the http://localhost:1841/ URL.
We are creating a simple mobile web app to use for a company's mobile site. The app includes a home page, a contact form, and a simple list that fetches Sencha's recent blog posts and allows visitors to read them on a mobile device.
After you have unzipped Sencha Touch, you can replace the code in the app.js file
with the example that follows.
Note: The starting content in the app.js file contains extra code
you can ignore for this example.
The following is an interactive sample app that you can change the code and preview the results:
Because the app uses a tab panel that holds the four pages, we start
by creating the UI. The entry point for Sencha Touch is the launch function of an
Ext.application. Consider this the main part of the application, and the place that
contains the application logic.
If you run this code in the browser (by clicking the Preview button), a Ext.tab.Panel appears on top of the screen. Since the home page could be a bit more welcoming, add some content to it and reposition the tab bar at the bottom of the page. By default, the tab bar is positioned at the top of the page, but setting the tabBarPosition config moves it to the page bottom. Then we add HTML into the items array to create content. Use items arrays to add child items into a container, as shown in the following code:
You can click the Preview button next to the example to inspect the result: you should see some HTML content, but it will not look very good. We add a cls config to the panel, adding a CSS class that we can target to make things look better. The CSS we add is in the examples/getting_started/resources/css/app.css file in the SDK download. Here is how the home page looks at this point:
Now that we have a decent looking home page, we move to the next screen. To keep the code for each page easy to follow, we create one tab at a time and then combine them all together at the end.
For now, we remove the first tab and replace it with a List. We use Google's Feed API service to fetch the feeds. Because there is more code involved, first we take a look at the result, then we explain how we accomplish it:
You can click the 'Code Editor' button above the example code to see the full code, but we will go over it piece by piece. At this point, instead of a panel, we use a nestedlist, and populate the list with the most recent blog posts fetched from sencha.com/blog. We use a Nested List component so that we can drill down in the blog entry by tapping the list.
Let us break down the previous code, starting with the list itself:
In the previous code, we gave the Nested List a number of one-line configurations - title, iconCls, and displayField - and a more detailed one called store. The Store config tells the nested list how to fetch its data. Let's examine each Store configuration:
Of all the Store configurations, proxy is doing the most important work. We are telling the proxy to use Google's Feed API service to return our blog data in JSON-P format. This allows us to grab feed data from a blog and view it in our app (for example, try swapping the Sencha blog URL for http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot in the previous example to fetch Slashdot's feed).
The last part of the proxy definition is a Reader. The reader is the entity that decodes the response from Google into useful data. When Google sends back the blog data, they nest it inside a JSON object that looks a bit like in the following example:
{
responseData: {
feed: {
entries: [
{author: 'Bob', title: 'Great Post', content: 'Really good content...'}
]
}
}
}
In this code, the important part is the entries array, so we set our Reader's rootProperty to 'responseData.feed.entries' and let the framework do the rest.
Now that we have our nested list fetching and showing data, we need to allow users to tap an entry to read it. To add this functionality, we add two more configurations to our Nested List, as follows:
{
xtype: 'nestedlist',
//all other configurations as above
detailCard: {
xtype: 'panel',
scrollable: true,
styleHtmlContent: true
},
listeners: {
itemtap: function(nestedList, list, index, element, post) {
this.getDetailCard().setHtml(post.get('content'));
}
}
}
In this code sample, we create a detailCard, which is a useful feature of Nested List that allows you to show a different view when a user taps on an item. We configured our detailCard to be a scrollable Panel that uses styleHtmlContent to make the text look good.
The final step is adding an itemtap listener, which calls our function whenever an item is tapped on. The function sets the detailCard's HTML to the content of the post on which you tapped. The framework animates the detail card into view to make the post appear. This was the only line of code we had to write to make the blog reader work.
The final thing we do for our app is create a contact form. We take the user's name, email address, and a message, and use a FieldSet to make it look good. T he code for this functionality is as follows:
This time we create a form that contains a fieldset. The fieldset contains three fields - one for a name, one for email address, and one for a message. We use a [[touch: Ext.layout.VBox VBox layout]] to arrange the items vertically on the page, one above the other.
At the bottom of the panel we added a Button with a tap handler. The handler uses the up method, which returns the form panel containing the button. We then call submit to submit the form, which sends it to the specified URL ('contact.php').
After creating each view individually, let's bring them all together into a complete app:
You can find the full source code of the Getting Started app in Sencha Fiddle.
After you create your app, you can build it using this command:
sencha app build
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