“Time, which alone makes the reputation of men, ends by making their defects respectable.”
— Voltaire
Once again, things were not quite as bad as I had originally envisioned. I definitely disliked returning to my workload chart page and having it revert back to all of the original, default settings. This was not good. But how best to fix it? I didn’t have that problem with my Data Table Content Selector, which also has multiple options, but that was built using a little bit different approach. Although there are two independent widgets on the page, they don’t really communicate with one another. The selector on the current page communicates with the Data Table widget on the next page, passing all of the information via URL parameters when it builds the URL for the next page. Reconfiguring the workload chart widget and underlying generic chart widget to adopt this philosophy seemed like a lot more work that I really wanted take on right at the moment.
Instead, I decided to leverage the same hack that I used in my dynamic breadcrumbs widget, leveraging the User Preferences feature to preserve the selections and then picking them back up each time the page loads. Here is the additional code I added to save the user’s selections in a User Preference that I called workload_selections:
var selections = {};
selections.group = data.group;
selections.type = data.type;
selections.frequency = data.frequency;
selections.ending = data.ending;
gs.getUser().setPreference('workload_selections', JSON.stringify(selections));
User Preferences are strings, so you have to convert the object to a string before you save it, and convert it back to an object when you fetch it back. Here is the code that I used to retrieve it once the page loads again:
selections = gs.getPreference('workload_selections');
if (selections) {
selections = JSON.parse(selections);
if (selections.group) {
data.group = selections.group;
data.type = getDefaultType();
data.type = selections.type;
data.frequency = selections.frequency;
data.ending = selections.ending;
}
}
You might have noticed that the value for the type selection was set twice, once to the default value and then again to the value saved in the User Preference. That’s because the getDefaultType function is actually a dual purpose function; not only does it return the default type value, but before it does so, it sets up the type options that are appropriate for the selected group (different groups are associated with different types of tasks). Since the group value preserved may be different than the default value, the appropriate list of type choices needs to be generated for that group before the preserved type value is established. Other than that, it’s pretty straightforward stuff.
That resolved the last known defect that I have been able to find so far, so it’s finally time to release another Update Set. If you happen to pull it down and try to use it, let me know if you find any others … thanks!
Update: There is a better (expanded) version here.
