Fly together Forever

In order to support IE, which does not run reliably under linux with ie4linux, I have to stick with M$ windows when working on dojo. However, the experience with windows svn client was not pleasant: as svn+ssh protocol is used to access dojo repository (among other svn repositories I use), I had to input my password each and every time when I update/commit to it. What’s more annoying, when doing some operation, such as svn log, I am asked three times for password (or maybe twice?).

I had hoped the svn client I use, TortoiseSVN, could support Public Key Authentication for svn+ssh, just as what the svn linux client can do.

Today, I had a look at the documentation of TortoiseSVN and found out that it IS INDEED possible to configure TortoiseSVN to use Public Key Authentication. It was just my assumption, it has not implemented this support, prevented me from digging into it.

The key point is to understand this: TortoiseSVN makes use of putty behind the scenes (more specifically, it uses a derivate work of plink, a windows ssh command client). You can tell putty to login ssh with Public Key Authentication: just go to Connection -> SSH -> Auth, select the a private key file for the authentication. Under Connection -> Data, you may also fill in Auto-login username, so that you don’t need to specify the username every time you login.

If you do not already have a pair of your own private/public keys, then you may want to check out PuTTYgen and Using public keys for SSH authentication.

If you come from linux world, like me, and already have your own private/public keys, just import it with PuTTYgen and save the private key to a format putty recognize, then select this saved private key in the place mentioned before. You have to save the session under a name, such as dojo, in order to make it accessible to other ssh dependent applications, such as TortoiseSVN.

Don’t forget to add your public key to file ~/.ssh/authorized_keys in your subversion server.

After that, you should be able to ssh to your remote server without input your password. Next step is to tell TortoiseSVN to make use this Public Key Authentication. You don’t need to explicitly teach TortoiseSVN to use putty for ssh connection. All you need to do is in the checkout dialog of TortoiseSVN, instead of the normal host of the svn repository server, you just specify the session name (in this case, it is dojo). So instead of checking out dojo from this address:

svn+ssh://liucougar@svn.dojotoolkit.org/var/src/dojo/trunk

just use this:

svn+ssh://dojo/var/src/dojo/trunk

That’s all. TortoiseSVN can make use all the information you saved in that session for ssh connection, and you don’t need to type in password any more. That’s neat.

(As how TortoiseSVN knows about session saved in putty, here is my guess: putty stores all information of sessions in windows register, so that’s can be accessed by TortoiseSVN.)

After Tom reviewed the patch, I went ahead and committed the enhanced widgetsInTemplates support (which used to be called enableSubWidgets).

In my previous blog post, I introduced what the support can achieve. Here I’d like to state some limitations of this patch:

• See the second test in the widgetsInTemplates test file: if a widget template file contains its own type of widget as a child widget (not matter directly or indirectly), it will lead to a infinite loop. It would be good to detect this, however I can not come up with a decent and fast way, so I just left it as it is.
• This kind of syntax for widgets in template file is not supported (if this syntax is used, the widget can be rendered, but attachPoint and attachEvent won’t work):

  <dojo:button .../>

  instead, please use this syntax:

  <input dojoType="dojo:Button" .../> 

  this limitation is also due to lack of decent ways of detecting the first syntax.

Some sample of how to use this, besides the test file, includes Editor2DialogContent widget defined in Editor2.js.

When I worked on dialog support for the new Editor2 (which is already committed to dojo svn), I wanted to use other dojo widgets in the template of the various dialogs: so instead of plain checkboxes/buttons, the more eyecandy widgets in dojo could be used.

Unfortunately, no widgets in widget template was supported by then. There indeed was a patch submitted for this very issue, but no official ways to achieve that.

After invesigating the code in the patch, I decided to write my own widget to support this. I took a slightly different approach. After asking Bill to review the first draft of the widget, we decided that merging the code into the DomWidget widget (the base widget for all HtmlWidgets) directly would be better. That was the origin of the enableSubWidgets patch.

Some days later, Morris pinged me and asked whether it would be possible to add more features to the subwidgets support. As I did not foresee the requirements Morris has for the more advanced usage, it tool several days for us to discuss/understand/implement new features. The final output is that we decided to rename enableSubWidgets to widgetsInTemplates, and a new patch.

A bit of doc about this patch is provided in the ticket, which I’d like to quote here as well:

1. It allows you to define widgets within your template markup. The feature must be enabled for the widget by defining widgetsInTemplate:true in your widget javascript (similar to how isContainer:true works)
2. It allows you to attach those subwidgets to your widget - just use dojoAttachPoint on the widget definition node and the code does the rest of the magic
3. It allows you to attach events from the subwidgets to your widget - just use dojoAttachEvents
4. It allows you to ‘wrap’ subwidgets that are containers, and have the subwidget act as the container within markup e.g. if you have a TabContainer widget in a template and set dojoAttachPoint="subContainerWidget" then any child widgets (in markup only) get attached to the subwidget rather than the defined widget

The patch will be reviewed soon and hopefully it can be included into the upcoming 0.4 release of dojo.