GWT/SmartGWT– Window popups with widgets

 

Recently I was implementing help infrastructure for our application. I wanted to have a help window open as a real popup and not a div popup that can hold smartgwt widgets to show help info.

There was no direct support for this in gwt or smartgwt however this can be achieved with a small hack.

Open a popup window by using the following JSNI script. This opens a new window popup with your own parameters and return the document from JSNI method. This gives you handle to popup’s document element.

private static native Document createWindowPopup() /*-{
        var win = window.open("", "win", "width=500,height=300,status=1,resizeable=1,scrollbars=1"); // a window object
        win.document.open("text/html", "replace");
        win.focus();
        return win.document;
    }-*/;

If you have handle to this document object you can simply add any widget to this document by

document.appendChild(myWidget.getElement());

Dont forget to close the document after writing to it.

private static native void closeDocument(Document document) /*-{
document.close();
}-*/;