Once… Twice… Then Reuse

I’m working with the awesome ExtJS framework again, creating an administrative interface to a huge amount of data. Each screen on this interface is basically a pageable grid with an editor window which pops up if you click a row. The grids can be sorted, and a separate filter area allows you to narrow down the items displayed on the grid in a manner unique to each screen.

The first time I wrote something like this using Monorail and ExtJS, I’d estimate that the javascript code was about 300 lines and the C# was maybe 150. Bear in mind that these screens, while differing due to the data being displayed, were essentially just CRUD interfaces. That means that to create a new screen, I’d be copying and pasting a lot of very similar code.

I’m sure you’ve been in this sitation before. If you’re really only going to be using this code in one or two places, there may be little value in making it a bit more generic. However, as soon as you break past that and find yourself copying and pasting the same code over and over, it’s a sure sign that you need to step back and pull out common functionality. That’ll provide three benefits:

1. Less code means less to maintain
2. It’s easier to create a new screen (copy/paste is never nice)
3. Code reuse means silly errors are more quickly caught

In my situation I first created an abstract CrudController class, which accepts a type parameter of the entity which you’re Creating, Reading, Updating and Deleting. Later I changed this class to CrudController to allow me to add search specifications in a generic way. This class contains all of the actions you’d expect for CRUD as well as some for writing out JSON strings.

In the ExtJS side of things, I was able to subclass the GridPanel component and have a component that would automatically have a PagingToolbar, a particular click handler, and other default settings. I was also able to tailor the arguments to reduce the amount of code I needed to write to create it. Here’s a simple example.

this.grid = new App.standardGrid({
	cm: new Ext.grid.ColumnModel([{
			header: 'Id',
			dataIndex: 'Id'
		}, {
			header: 'Created',
			dataIndex: 'CreatedOn',
			renderer: function(val) {
				return val.format('l d F Y');
			}
		}]),
	fields: [
				{name:'Id', type:'int'},
				{name:'CreatedOn', type:'date'}
			],
	url: '/admin/quote/getjsonlist.castle',
	edit: this.edit,
	scope: this
});

Secondly, I could create a subclassed Ext.Window which would give me a better reusable editor dialog. Here’s how I defined that:

App.window = Ext.extend(Ext.Window, {
	height: 500,
	width: 500,
	modal: true,
	resizable: false,
	draggable: false,
	closable: false,
	bodyStyle: 'background: #eee'
});

As you can see, this is just a matter of giving sane defaults for a modal window, but later I subclassed App.window itself to create App.formWindow which was much more powerful.

These three steps dramatically reduced the code required to create a new admin screen in my application. More importantly, I cut the amount of boilerplate code I was copying every time to zero, which meant the code I did have to write was all important stuff. Less wading through identikit javascript means I’m a much happier developer!