120988 - Generalized command manager for Venkman

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Other Applications Graveyard :: Venkman JS Debugger, defect)

Description

[Robert Ginda]

Patch coming up integrates a generalized "Command Manager" in Venkman.  This
should make it very easy to add console commands, menu/menu items, and context
menus to the debugger.  It'll also make it possible for plugins to extend the
debugger commandset and user interface at runtime.  It works roughly as follows...

command-manager.js
This file defines the CommandRecord and CommandManager objects.  CommandRecords
represent reusable functions that the host application would like to make public
via the command line or user interface.  CommandRecords have |label|, |name|,
|usage|, |flags|, |key|, and |function| properties.  CommandRecords can format
these fields into strings to provide a form of self-documentation.

The CommandManager keeps collections of CommandRecords (via the |addCommand|
method.  The CommandManager also provides |addMenuItem|, |addToolbarItem|, and
|addPopupItem| methods, for adding a CommandRecord to the user interface.
In addition, the CommandManager will also manage the visible, checked, and
enabled attributes of user interface items under its control.  For example, if a
command, "help", were added as a popup item, with the "enabledif" attribute set
to "this.hasHelp", and |eval("this.hasHelp");| returned false when called from
the "onpopupshowing" event for the popup, "help" would become greyed out.

venkman-commands.js
This file implements the set of commands available from Venkman.  Some custom
functions are used to create the CommandRecords.  These functions look up
strings in my .properties files, based on the command name, in order to simplify
cmdary.
Note that *all* of the commands take exactly one parameter.  This parameter is
the "event" object created when the command was dispatched.  When commands are
dispatched as text, as in from the console, parameters are automaticaly parsed
and validated by the CommandManager, and placed on the event object.  For
example, if the "help" command is defined to take parameters of the format
"[<help-subject>]", and the command "help foo" is dispatched, the event will
have the property |helpSubject| set to "foo".  If the parameter is not provided
(the braces in the format string make it optional), then it is initialized to
|null| by the CommandManager.  This allows the commands defined in
venkman-commands.js to omit most of the parameter checking.

venkman-menus.js
This file defines the menu, toolbar, and context menus used by Venkman.  Again
(as with venkman-commands.js), Venkman specific utility functions are used to
make it as simple as possible (maybe even too simple) to hook up a command to
a particular menu.



There is much more to the patch, but if you've read this far you're probably
bored by now, so I'll stop typing :)

Comments, questions, and suggestions would be appreciated.

Comment 1

[Robert Ginda]

Attachment: large patch

Comment 2

[Robert Ginda]

checked in

Comment 3

[Christopher Aillon (sabbatical, not receiving bugmail)]

rs vrfy checked in.