[OpenLayers-Dev] Map event confusion

[Marc Jansen]

Hi all,

so do you all think I should open up a ticket with milestone 2.10 
including a patch that does

    * leave the events in the EVENT_TYPES array as they currently are
    * but changes the documentation to not reference the events
          o addmarker,
          o removemarker,
          o clearmarkers,
          o dragstart,
          o dragend,
          o drag,
          o popupopen,
          o popupclose anymore?
    * should I add yet another ticket to remove the unneeded events in 3.0?

What do you think? I am willing to provide a patch for the above ticket.

Regards and thanks for your opinions,
Marc


Stephen Woodbridge schrieb:
> Christopher Schmidt wrote:
>   
>> On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 03:32:36PM -0600, Tim Schaub wrote:
>>     
>>> Marc Jansen wrote:
>>>       
>>>> Hi devs,
>>>>
>>>> I am rather confused about the documentation about map-events. Is it 
>>>> right that
>>>>
>>>>     * addmarker,
>>>>     * removemarker,
>>>>     * clearmarkers,
>>>>     * dragstart,
>>>>     * dragend,
>>>>     * drag
>>>>
>>>> are defined but never get triggered?
>>>>
>>>> If so, they should IMHO be removed from the EVENT_TYPES-array and the 
>>>> documentation for that.
>>>>
>>>>         
>>> The problem with removing things from the EVENT_TYPES array is that 
>>> there could be applications that have subscribers for them and use 
>>> map.events to publish.
>>>
>>> If we remove those entries, those applications break.
>>>
>>> I know this is silly.  You are right to point out that there is little 
>>> sense and lots of confusion in having them.
>>>
>>> Our safest bet is to mark them as unused and remove them in 3.0.  If 
>>> others think the caution is not needed, I wouldn't be opposed to 
>>> removing them.
>>>       
>> In general, I'm supportive of any changes that make things simpler which
>> means that applications that did not throw errorrs in earlier releases will
>> continue to not throw errors in future releases. 
>>
>> In this particular case, it's hard to imagine that someone has written
>> code that specifically registers for an event that doesn't do anything.
>>
>> With sufficient documentation, I'd be willing to change the code to not
>> have those events. However,  since events (unlike methods) are not actually
>> in existence in the Natural Docs except if they're documented, I think
>> it would be equally successful -- for anyone who isn't actually digging
>> into the code itself, a fact that describes more and more of our users --
>> to just not document those events. At that point, the events simply
>> 'disappear' from the docs completely without any other work on our
>> part.
>>
>> -- Chris
>>     
>
> Chris, et al,
>
> I can appreciate this sentiment, I think there are a lot of "casual" 
> users that will not dig into the code and in those cases, if it is not 
> in the docs then the problem does indeed go away. But there are a small 
> but healthy number of "coders" who are trying to do more with OpenLayers 
> like Marc, myself and others I'm sure that do dig into the code and 
> spend a lot of time chasing our tails, aka: learning? :) because we try 
> something like an event that never gets triggered and then scratch our 
> heads for a while trying to figure out why. We eventually do figure it 
> out or ask and get help. I would like to see doc that better explains 
> what events exist and what gets passed to them. I have also noticed that 
> there is a trend to move away from callbacks, which were somewhat better 
> documented, in favor of using events (or maybe I'm mistaken) and some 
> objects say register for such and such event to get notified when 
> something happens, but there is no additional information as to what is 
> passed to the event, etc.
>
> Regardless, I'm loving OL and continued to be impressed by how much is 
> built into OL and how easy OL is to extend once I can get my head to 
> think about the problem in in the right way.
>
> Thanks all and best regards,
>    -Steve
>
>   
>>> Tim
>>>
>>>       
>>>> Please ignore the mail if I missed something fundamental (but please 
>>>> enlighten me where these events are triggered)
>>>>
>>>> Regards,
>>>> Marc
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Dev mailing list
>>>> Dev at openlayers.org
>>>> http://openlayers.org/mailman/listinfo/dev
>>>>         
>>> -- 
>>> Tim Schaub
>>> OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org
>>> Expert service straight from the developers.
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Dev mailing list
>>> Dev at openlayers.org
>>> http://openlayers.org/mailman/listinfo/dev
>>>       
>
> _______________________________________________
> Dev mailing list
> Dev at openlayers.org
> http://openlayers.org/mailman/listinfo/dev
>
>