conclusions after a day of wrestling

[J-P Minderhoud]

Hi,

First of all thanx for the new Rotator it's much more elegant than the old one.
But after a day of trying to get it working the way my client had envisioned it I came up with the following issues, bugs, or whatever you want to call them.

1. The client mouseover / -out events do not seem to work when in Buttons(-over) mode
2. The FromCode examples as shown in the Demo (http://www.telerik.com/demos/aspnet/prometheus/Rotator/Examples/ClientAPIControl/DefaultCS.aspx) do not work when showing more the 1 item at the time. I'm showing the first 6 items and when I tried to use the client script as shown in the demo the 'next' and 'previous' button code made the rotator scroll to the 7th item and show items 7 to 12 when I expected the showNext method to scroll 1 item and show 2 to 7. The method showNext seems to behave more like a showNextScreen then a showNextItem.
3. I noticed the rotator has two client-side methods set_height and set_width. When I saw those I thought I could use them and be able to build exactly what was asked by the client. They may not be completely finished yet or aren't for public use because they do not resize the rotator. Yes they do resize the outermost DIV but that does not make the viewable area bigger, the radr_relativeWrapper and radr_clipRegion DIV's are not resized.
4. When in Buttons(-Over) mode the width of the buttons is use in the calculation of the with of the viewable area. I did not expect this because in my opinion the buttons have nothing to do with the rotator itself they are only a way to control it.
5. When in AutoAdvance of FromCode mode the buttons should not be rendered at all and not be hidden but css as they are now.
6. A couple of feature idea's:
- Add Value property to Item and make FindItemByValue() both server- and client-side available.
- Add the possibility to add custom attributes to an item server-side that can later be retrieved client-side.
- A combination RotatorType of AutoAdvance and ButtonsOver. A ButtonsOver rotator that has a default direction and starts automatically as an AutoAdvance. But when on mouseover on a button the direction changed in that direction and on mouseout the rotator stops, and will only continue in a direction when a button is clicked, or keeps going in the direction the button points.
- Client-side event handlers for button events (mouseover/-on and click)
- Client-side OnClientRotatorLoaded event handler.

There maybe more I wanted to add but I'll stay with this for now. I hope you guys can do something with these ideas.

Thanx and keep up the good work.

J-P

[Tsvetie]

Hi J-P Minderhoud,
First of all, thank you for the constructive feedback and for the kind words.

Straight to your questions:

1. I am not sure what you mean, and in case I misunderstood you, please explain in detail the current behavior and the expected one.
   I suppose you mean that when you have RotatorType=Buttons/ButtonsOver, positioning the mouse over a rotator item while they are scrolling, does not stop the animation. This behavior is by design and in my opinion, this is the correct behavior. We would however appreciate your point of view on the matter. Do you expect the animation to stop as soon as the mouse is over a rotator item?
2. The different RototorTypes have different behavior when using the showNext method - in some cases, it shows the next item and in the rest - the next viewport. For the time being, RotatorType=FromCode is of the second type. The behavior you expect in this case is possible and I will log it for consideration. In case we decide that this is what the user expects, we will change it.
3. We are aware of this problem and it is on our TODO list.
4. Generally, when you set the Width / Height of a control, you set the Width / Height of the control as a whole and its parts should size according to the values of these properties. These settings should not depend on any other setting of the control. In particular, in case the RadRotator was implemented the way you suggest, setting RotatorType=Buttons would cause the control to take up more space of the page, than it is specified with its Width/Height properties. And switching  RotatorType to "AutomaticAdvance" would cause a change in the layout of a page, as the space the RadRotator takes would decrease. I hope you agree, that this would lead to a lot of problems when building the layout of a page.
5. In general, you are correct. However, we have done this on purpose, because this would make out job on implementing the features we have on our TODO list for the RadRotator, easier. We have not yet implemented the functionality we envision for this control and that is why this behavior seems strange to you. We, for example, intend to make it possible for the developer to change the RotatorType on the client.
6. Thank you for these feature requests. I have forwarded all of them to our developers and we will do our best to implement them for SP1, scheduled for the last week of August.

I have updated your Telerik points for taking the time to prepare this list of questions and feature requests.

All the best,
Tsvetie
the Telerik team

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[J-P Minderhoud]

Hi Tsvetie,

Thanx for the reply.

1: I meant the OnClientMouseOver and OnClientMouseOut handlers aren't called when in Buttons/-Over mode.
4: I do agree. I didn't think about the implications you mention.
5: That makes sense although I think, for a heavily javascript based control as this is, dynamically inserting the button anchors isn't that big of a deal. But I see your point that it makes developing new functionality a lot easier.

I thought of one more feature I would like to see. As I've implemented the rotator as a navigational tool, by redirecting the user to another url when clicking on an item, I thought I might be an idea to add a NavigationUrl property to an item and when this is set clicking an item will redirect to that url without having to implement the ItemClicked server-side handler.

Keep up the good work and I'll look forward to the SP1.

J-P

[Tsvetie]

Hello,
Thank you for the clarification regarding the first problem you reported - with the additional information I was able to reproduce it and added it to our TODO list for SP1.

Getting to your latest feature request - I will add it to our list of features for future consideration.

Best wishes,
Tsvetie
the Telerik team

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[Shaun Peet]

I also like the idea of a NavigateUrl property as there's some specific uses of the control which are likely quite common that would benefit from this:

1) Scores Ticker / Rotator - where each item could like to the box score of a game

2) Products Rotator - where each item would like to that product's details page.

3) Sponsors Rotator - where each item would link to the sponsor's website.

For the third, you'd probably also want to be able to specify the target attribute for the navigation.

Shaun.

[Georgi Tunev]

Hello Shaun,

Thank you for your input - it has been logged.
By the way with the current version of RadRotator, you can achieve such behavior by using links on the items - you can check this demo for example:
http://www.telerik.com/demos/aspnet/prometheus/Rotator/Examples/BannerRotation/DefaultCS.aspx




Regards,
Georgi Tunev
the Telerik team

Check out Telerik Trainer, the state of the art learning tool for Telerik products.

[Shaun Peet]

I understand that you can put a hyperlink in the ItemTemplate, but I think that the NavigateUrl would set the onclick property of the wrapper element for the entire item template.  Again, it would be for simplicity.

[Georgi Tunev]

OK Shaun,

Thanks again for the feedback.


Greetings,
Georgi Tunev
the Telerik team

Check out Telerik Trainer, the state of the art learning tool for Telerik products.