In my previous post I presented an example of a basic ASP.NET MVC3 controller connecting to an ExtJS4 data store and passing some data in XML format via store’s load method.
So far I’ve run into just one issue with this setup – clean error handling. By default, ASP.NET MVC will spit out any exceptions in clear text (with <html> tags and everything), which is not very useful when building a quality web application. Here’s what I want on my errors:
In this example I will demonstrate how to use an ExtJS4 store to perform an XML data read from an ASP.NET MVC3 controller. First let me say that I wasted a LOT of time reading fake tutorials on these keywords – seems there are a lot of people who can explain the ASP.NET MVC3 side, but not how to actually connect it to an ExtJS4 store using a clean proxy, AND pass parameters to the server. Especially using XML for the return data.
So, let’s say we just want a basic search box – when user types something in and hits Search, we will use an ExtJS4 store and POST to an ASP.NET MVC3 method, passing the search query as a JSON parameter, while returning results in XML. Here’s the basic ExtJS model & store configuration:
// Basic model Ext.define('MY.model.SearchResult', { extend: 'Ext.data.Model', fields: ['id','html'] }); // Basic store Ext.create('Ext.data.Store',{ model: 'MY.model.SearchResult', proxy: Ext.create('MY.proxy.MSAjaxProxy', { url: '/User/Search', reader: { type: 'xml', root: 'matches', record: 'match' } }) // eo proxy }) // eo store |
See Previous Example First!
Takeaway from this post: Sencha SDK Tools 1.2.3 are still beta and I don’t advise using them in production. This is a follow up post to my previous examples – I spent some time the other day trying to set up a 1-click build process for ExtJS, and failed!
Custom Build File Size
First, let’s talk about the incorrect file size shown on this screenshot in my previous 2 posts:
In the “Custom Build” example, the custom-built app-all.js is shown as being 120KB in size. In reality, the file is about 400KB in size on the disk. I don’t understand why that is – compression? If that was the case, wouldn’t the 1MB ext-all.js in the “Full Framework” example be something closer to 200KB? After some Googling I couldn’t figure out how to tell if a file was compressed. Any advice here is welcome as I’m a bit lost.
See Previous Example first!
In this tutorial we’ll make a Windows batch script to automate building of the custom ExtJS4 framework. We’ll also touch on declaring dependencies in custom components. Ultimately, this serves for much faster load times and less wasted bandwidth:
In this tutorial I will show you how to reduce your ExtJS4 application load times by half, using Sencha SDK Tools. Also, I will show you how to do a clean custom build, the kind that doesn’t cause your production code to occasionally download JS files via autoloader. Another gem of this example – we’ll get our “compiled” JS down to just about 100 KB, instead of 500 KB+ that results if you follow other tutorials.
