Calendar Control: Calendar inside a Container

The default Calendar/CalendarGroup controls do not provide positioning or dragdrop support natively, as the Container family's Overlay control and its subclasses do.

This example demonstrates how the Calendar control can be wrapped in a Container (a Dialog control in this case) which allows you to leverage Container family features to position the Calendar relative to a context element, or if desired provide a draggable Calendar.

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Date:

Calendar

Setting up the Calendar and Container

In this example, we leverage Dialog's context configuration property to position the Calendar relative to a "Calendar" button, and Dialog's buttons property to provide "Select" and "Cancel" buttons for the Calendar. We set the dialog's draggable property to false for this example, however if the application required it, we could also easily set draggable to true to get a draggable Calendar.

When creating a Calendar which is to be placed inside a Container control there are a few areas which require special attention.

1. Dialog Width

   When using Sam skin, Dialogs require a width to be set to avoid rendering problems with IE6 and IE7 quirks mode.

   The Calendar by default has no specific width defined (it's content defines how wide it is) but we set a width which is wide enough to allow for Calendar's default Sam skin implementation.

   dialog = new YAHOO.widget.Dialog("container", { context:["show", "tl", "bl"], buttons:[ {text:"Select", isDefault:true, handler: okHandler}, {text:"Cancel", handler: cancelHandler}], width:"16em", // Sam Skin dialog needs to have a width defined (7*2em + 2*1em = 16em). draggable:false, close:true });

   In order to allow the Calendar to take up the full width of the Dialog, we set the .bd padding to 0. We also over-ride the Calendar container's pixel based padding, in favor of ems, which allows us to set an em based width for the Dialog and have it resize automatically with text size changes.

   #container .bd {padding:0;} #cal {border:none;padding:1em}
2. Dialog Content Changes

   Whenever the contents of the Calendar are changed we fire Dialog's changeContent event so any of Dialog's rendered elements which need to be kept in sync are redrawn (such as the size of the shadow underlay for IE6/Safari2). We could optimize this, by checking for an actual change in dimensions before firing the changeContent event, using Calendar's beforeRenderEvent but the simpler approach is taken for the purposes of the example.

   The Calendar has hide_blank_weeks set to true to illustrate the fact that the shadow is resized when the height of the Calendar changes.

   calendar.renderEvent.subscribe(function() { // Tell Dialog it's contents have changed. dialog.fireEvent("changeContent"); });

   NOTE: Normally if you were to change the contents of the Dialog's header, body or footer elements (e.g. using dialog.setBody(...)), changeContent would be fired automatically, but in this case, we're changing the contents of the Calendar, and not the body element directly so we need to inform the Dialog that something inside the body changed.

3. Handling Calendar's Float

   CSS is used to clear Calendar's float:left and allow the Dialog body element to wrap the Calendar.

   #container .bd:after {content:".";display:block;clear:left;height:0;visibility:hidden;}
4. Double Iframe Shims

   Calendar's iframe property is set to false since the Dialog already provides iframe shim support and we want to avoid duplicating shims for performance reasons.

5. Workaround IE's border-collapse:collapse Issue

   IE has a known issue related to collapsed table borders remaining visible even though the table's containing element has its visibility set to hidden (See Container known issues).

   Since the Sam skin Calendar uses border-collapse:collapse and the Dialog is hidden using visibility:hidden, we need to use the workaround mentioned in the known issues section above, to make sure Calendar's table borders get hidden when the Dialog is hidden.

   // Using dialog.hide() instead of specifying visible:false in the constructor config options // is a workaround for an IE6/7 container known issue with border-collapse:collapse. dialog.hide();

As a side note, this example also shows how you can use the simpler version of the Calendar constructor, providing only the container id (available as of 2.4.0) and also how you can use Calendar's locale properties to create long date strings from a JavaScript Date object.