+1 obviously.
I encountered this need multiple times. One such example is the Document
Tree which uses the jstree library which accepts as node icon an URL, a
path or a CSS class name. I believe it is common in the JavaScript world to
be able to specify an icon either as an URL/path or as a CSS icon. The
reason Adel proposed "renderJSON" is because this method is needed mainly
when you generate JSON and the client that receives the JSON wants to have
100% control over the HTML that is generated (so injecting the HTML we get
from renderHTML is not an option).
Note that besides renderJSON we would also need a method to pull the
resources required by the icon set. I propose something like:
$services.icon.use() <--- pull the resources for the configured icon set
$services.icon.use('someIconSet') <--- pull the resources for the specified
icon set
These methods will call ssx, jsx, etc. under the hood. This is done already
when you call render() and renderHTML() but it obviously doesn't work if
you call render* on an AJAX request that returns JSON.
Thanks,
Marius
On Thu, Jun 14, 2018 at 12:56 PM, Adel Atallah <adel.atallah(a)xwiki.com>
wrote:
Hi devs,
I'm making a rest resource to get a list of pages and, for a query, I
want to specify an icon (as a metadata) for each pages in the resulted
json.
The problem is that the icon APIs (and more specifically the
IconManager class) only allow us to render the icon in HTML or
velocity and this shouldn't be put inside a json response.
Also we can't hardcode the icon class or image URL to be used as it
depends on the iconset configured for the wiki. Another possibility
would be to render the icon using javascript but it will not be very
efficient.
As discussed with Marius, our proposal would be to add a new method to
the IconManager to get either the icon URL (e.g.
http://xwiki.org/xwiki/resources/icons/silk/page.png) or the icon
class (e.g. fa fa-page) depending of the specified iconset.
We could then have this new property to the icon theme definition:
## Silk
xwiki.iconset.render.json=$xwiki.getSkinFile("icons/silk/${icon}.png")
## FontAwesome
xwiki.iconset.render.json=fa fa-$icon
We could name the new method renderJSON or something more generic (if
you have any idea).
WDYT?
Thanks,
Adel