[Laszlo-user] When is 'isinit' set?

[P T Withington]

On 2007-07-12, at 07:29 EDT, Robin Sheat wrote:

> On Thursday 12 July 2007 22:51:14 P T Withington wrote:
>> Note that in 4.x, handlers on the instance being constructed that
>> would be triggered due to setting initial values into the instance
>> are deferred until _all_ the initial values are set -- so the
>> handlers will not see a partially constructed instance.
> I'm using 3.3 (I tried writing the app for 4, but there was a bug I  
> couldn't
> figure out (I think to do with the stretch attribute on view), and  
> I'm under
> a time constraint. When I get this app finished and working in 3.3,  
> I'll go
> back and try to reproduce it)
>
> My issue is that I have handlers set that report back to the server  
> when
> certain attributes change, and of course on initialisation, there  
> is a flurry
> of events that I want to ignore (being the initial data setting). I  
> was
> hoping that it would always be the case that attributes would be  
> set, then
> isinited set, or at least that my oninit handler would be called,  
> however it
> seems that neither of those are reliable.

isinited should be false initially.  It is set right before calling  
init and sending oninit, because it is used internally to prevent  
init being called more than once.

> My current, very ugly, workaround
> is to simply count the number of events: if there are 4 attributes,  
> ignore
> the first 4 events. Not nice, but it means that it works.

Maybe a better thing would be to create your own flag to silence the  
handlers and set that flag to true when you get the oninit event?

> (I have learnt an important lesson though, when writing your first  
> significant
> Laszlo app, keep working until it becomes unmaintainable, and then  
> start
> again using all the knowledge you picked up the first time around -  
> my new
> one is about 2/3rds the size, faster, much more maintainable, has more
> features, and has taken me about three weeks (compared to a couple  
> of months
> the first time around) :)

Good advice for any project.  The title of one of the chapters in  
Fred Brooks's "Mythical Man Month" is "Plan to throw one away (you  
will anyway)".