Click 2.3.0 Milestone 1  is available for download. This milestone contains important new features including Ajax support, Page Actions and light-weight stateful controls. In addition there are new documentation, examples and other minor enhancements.

New features and improvement

  • Ajax support.
  • Page Action support.
  • Stateful Controls.
  • Improve fields to only be processed if they have an incoming request
    parameter. This improvement streamlines dynamic forms since fields
    added at runtime during s POST request won't bind their values and
    won't be validated for that request. In subsequent requests the Field
    will have an incoming parameter and so will have it's value bound and
    validated. Another advantage is that dynamically added Fields won't
    have their default value overridden in the POST request they were added in.
    This issue has been raised by Nirmal Solanki
    [CLK-722].
  • Added automapping support for GAE with a caveat that page templates
    must be placed under the folders page or pages.
    This issue was raised by Ke Sun
    [CLK-639].
  • Added MessagesMapService
    interface to support pluggable messages map implementations
    [CLK-655].
  • Improved MessagesMap
    to be extendable and customizable
    [CLK-728].
  • Added support for loading DateField
    translations for month and day names from the JDK.
    [CLK-650].
  • Added support for Menus that do not have roles defined.
    If no roles are defined,
    IsUserInRoles
    passes a null argument to
    hasAccess
    to determine whether access is permitted to menus without roles
    [CLK-724].
  •  Added support for absolute page classnames when configuring pages
    in click.xml. Absolute classnames aids with IDE hot-linking
    and is less confusing to use.
    [CLK-704]. 
  • Fixed escaping of control values and attributes to be XML friendly
    in order to support Ajax requests. Previously all HTML characters was escaped,
    now only the following characters are escaped: <, >, ", ', &
    [CLK-674]. 

New documentation:

New examples:

Removed:

  • Removed the ability to automatically bypass validation for
    Forms through JavaScript. This ability was added in 2.2.0 but raised
    concerns over security and was dropped for 2.3.0. If you used this
    feature in existing applications, please see the
    Upgrade path
    for a safe alternative to bypass validation. We apologize for
    the inconvenience.

Deprecated:

  • Deprecated stateful page support: Page.setStateful().

  • Stateful pages had the following issues:

    • Stateful pages was introduced to make it easier to store page state across
      multiple HTTP requests. However developing a stateful page is very different
      from developing a stateless one and this lead to Click applications that are
      inconsistent and harder to maintain.
    • In addition stateful page support has never been implemented consistently
      across the framework and some components did not work correctly.
    • Stateful pages are very coarse grained, making it difficult to control
      which objects are stored in the session.
    • Stateful pages have also introduced unnecessary complexity in the framework
      itself, which can now be phased out.

    Unfortunately there is no direct upgrade path from a stateful page.
    However the majority of use cases are catered for by the new stateful
    support in the controls: Table, Form, TabbedPanel, Field and AbstractLink.

The Apache Click team