Positioning a canvas at the bottom of a page

[svonmiller]

Greetings,

We're using Ver 8. I'm trying to do something simple, but am perplexed as to how to achieve it. I have a canvas that I've put a few other ISC objects into. This canvas is to be the footer of every page.

The problem is that most pages have a large number isc objects (section stacks for example) that are doing ajax data calls and expanding as the data arrives. Therefore, I have no idea how to set the top coordinate for the footer canvas, since the page is constantly expanding as data comes back.

I thought perhaps I could experiment with canvas.getOffsetY(), but I keep getting 'NaN' when I do an alert on the result.

How is positioning an element at the bottom of a screen commonly achieved when using an ajax framework?

Thanks,
S

[Isomorphic]

Just put the footer and the rest of a page into a VLayout.

[svonmiller]

It's not that simple, as this is an enormous application, with hundreds of unique pages. Each unique page has many isc objects. Each jsp page includes a header jsp and a footer jsp. Those includes would need to know what isc objects are contained in each of the unique jsps and make those children of the parent layout. I can't think of a way to do that that wouldn't end up being a big mess.

We currently have a number of isc objects at the top of the page, located in the header.jsp, which is included throughout the app and works fine. It's obviously easy to position at the top.

I gather from the response this doesn't come up often, or at all. I can't believe everyone creates a parent container throughout an entire application just to support a footer. There must be some other solution. I'll have to ponder it more.

[Isomorphic]

Um, no, a page-level container is very typical and is the right way to do this.

It's not clear what you're saying about the existing application - there are body and footer elements on different pages with completely random names on different pages?? They obviously need to know something about each other or they'd just overlap. As soon as they can agree on the footer knowing the name of the standard main page layout, or the main page knowing the name of the footer's outer element, you can combine them and you're done - and this is the minimal information they would need in order to coordinate, under any strategy.

[svonmiller]

Assume nothing is in the footer, since it does indeed overlap and isn't working properly. The header works fine, because everything is positioned relative to the top x,y coordinate of 0,0. So I can provide a global x,y coordinate for each content.jsp using 0,0 as the reference point. With this strategy, the isc objects in the header don't need to know anything about the objects in the content pages.

Now that I'm thinking through it via this discussion, I suppose that each content page could have a parent container - "contentParent" - and then the vlayout in the header could assume that there is always a "contentParent" in each page. Our application is quite large and involved, but I think this approach might work. It's hard to know, since we're using htmlFlow and a variety of other methods to bolt smartclient onto an old backend. But a parent container would solve this issue and probably provide some extensibility in other areas.

Thanks,
S