Projects:WAD Hints Generation/Technical Specifications

WAD Hints Generation - Technical Specifications

General considerations

The place to set the text for hints is the title or alt HTML attributes as it is doing until now for some elements (toolbar buttons, help button, info button, etc.).

The only problem with this attribute is that is not able to show HTML tags so HTML should be avoided.

Another consideration to take into account is that this information shouldn't be generated by WAD in the HTML template because this would cause to increase highly the size of served HTML.

Implementation

The elements that are able to show hints will include in their onmouseover attribute a call to a Javascript function. This function will ask using AJAX to a servlet for the text to be displayed in the hint and will populate the alt attribute using it.

To use this is necessary to change the onmouseover attribute for the elements that will show hints. This must be done in the WAD label template, in the menu and in the tabs generator classes.

A new preference must be created to be able to disable/enable this feature.

The Javascript should appear only in case the show hint option is enabled reducing thus the size of the page in case it is not.