How do you tell when a view is loaded in extjs? - extjs

Question

Im working on an extjs application. We're have a page that is for looking at a particular instance of an object and viewing and editing it's fields.
We're using refs to get hold of bits of view in the controller.
This was working fine, but I've been sharding the controller into smaller pieces to make it more managable and realised that we are relying on a race condition in our code.
The logic is as follows:
Initialise the controller
parse the url to extract the id of the object
put in a call to load the model with the given view.
in the load callback call the controller load method...
The controller load method creates some stores which fire off other requests for bits of information using this id. It then uses some of the refs to get hold of the view and then reconfigures them to use the stores when they load.
If you try and call the controller load method immediately (not in the callback) then it will fail - the ref methods return undefined.
Presumably this is because the view doesnt exist... However we aren't checking for that - we're just relying on the view being loaded by the time the server responds which seems like a recipe for disaster.
So how can we avoid this and be sure that a view is loaded before trying to use it.

Answer 1

I haven't tried rewriting the logic here yet but it looks like the afterrender event probably does what I want.
It seems like waiting for both the return of the store load and afterrender events should produce the correct result.
A nice little abstraction here might be something like this:
yourNamespace.createWaitRunner = function (completionCallback) {
var callback = completionCallback;
var completionRecord = [];
var elements = 0;
function maybeFinish() {
var done = completionRecord.every(function (element) {
return element === true
});
if (done)
completionCallback();
}
return {
getNotifier: function (func) {
func = func || function (){};
var index = elements++;
completionRecord[index] = false;
return function () {
func(arguments);
completionRecord[index] = true;
maybeFinish();
}
}
}
};
You'd use it like this:
//during init
//pass in the function to call when others are done
this.waiter = yourNamespace.createWaitRunner(controller.load);
//in controller
this.control({
'SomeView': {
afterrender: this.waiter.getNotifier
}
});
//when loading record(s)
Ext.ModelManager.getModel('SomeModel').load(id, {
success: this.waiter.getNotifier(function (record, request) {
//do some extra stuff if needs be
me.setRecord(record);
})
});
I haven't actually tried this out yet so it might not be 100% but I think the idea is sound