Using a FormItem without DynamicForm

[yavery]

Hi,

We have a particular need where we require the formatting features offered by
some FormItem component (spinner, masks, etc), but don't want to rely on the
built-in field layout that comes with DynamicForm.

The situation is that we have a legacy HTML file which already does the layout
of the fields inside an HTML <TABLE> with fields inside some of its <TD> elements.

I want to leverage SmartClient's field formatting functionality, without the need to
change the form layout mechanism of that legacy page.

The only way I found was to have one field per DynamicForm or use the
somewhat undocumented DynamicForm.makeInlineItem() ... The problem
with both these approaches is that my page's rendering is very slow due
to the large amount of fields nested within that table.

By the way, these fields will not need to get submitted thru any form, hence
what I would have liked to use are non FORM-based versions of the input
controls within the SmartClient framework ...

Any other ideas on how I could achieve something similar but which would
render faster in the browser?

Thanks in advance for your help and support!

[Isomorphic]

Is this 50+ items? If not, then it's suspicious that it would be slow even on older browsers.

Regardless, if every item is logically independent, consider replacing the original HTML form items only selectively, where it matters most.

[yavery]

Yes. It's 50+ items. It's an HTML table for which the layout is rendered by some legacy JSP
page but we want to have the actual input boxes inside each TD to look like the rest of the application (formatting, etc).

We'll go over our design and see if we could only enable this for a shorter amount of cells. If not,
we'll use custom lightweight JS to mimic smartclient behavior as close as possible ... :-(

Thanks,

[Isomorphic]

The more direct method may simply be to replace the legacy JSP's layout with a DynamicForm-based layout?

[yavery]

Sorry for the late follow-up ...

This JSP code is not actually ours. It's a third party framework which we're embedding
inside our main application via an IFRAME (HtmlPane). Having it rewritten using pure ISC would
be ideal performance/feature wise but would also close all doors to future updates
for that particular framework. For that reason, we opted to use minimum/lightweight JS
for that IFRAME's content (small JS code footprint) which links back to the parent frame
containing the main application and the full ISC framework. Works fine and we're
quite happy with the end result.

Thanks for any input and suggestions. As always, greatly appreciated.