I am trying to spread the Telerik component libraries into my organization but one of the biggest problems is the lack of extensibility.
In one of my projects this week, one customer wanted to modify the filter toolbar in the MVC Grid. I had a quick look into the source code and found the following problems:
It is impossible to extend Grid because you reference Grid<t> in too many places. I really don’t understand the meaning of the interface IGrid if you do not use it. Is there a reason why you do not create IGrid<t> and reference that instead?
Many HtmlBuilder classes are hardcoded in Grid which means that it is impossible to replace/inject new code for HTML generation.
The real question is: do you want other developers to be able add/modify features in the MCV component library? If the answer is yes, then you need to add more flexibility into the framework. No sensible developer will go into the existing codebase and make changes that will bring to an end all Teletik updates. We are looking for non intrusive ways to do changes that lay on top of the Telerik MVC framework.
Microsoft MVC 3 is moving rapidly into this direction and I am sure it will boost your sales when more developers can extend your products.
Keep up the good work!
1 Answer, 1 is accepted
Indeed, we are aware that there a few shortcomings concerning extensibility in current implementation of some of our extensions. However, I can assure you that we are constantly working on addressing them and improving our code base in general. Therefore, we will highly appreciate if you can provided any concrete suggestion about how the implementation of the functionality in question should be improved.
All the best,
Rosen
the Telerik team