New Combination Logic

Hi,

Well, I got a lot done.

The group decided that we'd go with combining everything into a single hierarchy.  This has a few disadvantages, but as it happened it worked out well.

With respect to the new algorithm, it turns out that:

1. The algorithm is (genuine surprise) simpler.  This is partly because:
2. Positioning no longer needs to be changed explicitly.
3. Technically, the first two levels of hierarchy are combined, instead of merely the first, just because of how SmartGWT implements it.
4. In the rendered HTML, the page's canvas cannot have its own background color differing from the template's.  To do this, you will now need to make a div the size of the canvas and then fill it with color.  This is a direct consequence of merging the hierarchy, and is one of the disadvantages.  It may be necessary to try to merge the page's and the template's top level hierarchies, instead of just choosing one.  I may need some help with the HTML.
5. The renderer will now attempt to figure out if something has a menu or not--no more passing in flags.  The algorithm checks for menus in the template AND in the page and will move them up (in the event of more than one menu being found (which shouldn't happen, I hope), the menus will have the same z-index and will be on top of each other).
6. The algorithm *should* be safe on all valid data (e.g., you shouldn't be able to crash it by typing "<" in a string or something).
7. The algorithm still fails if the canvas has overflown, because of a bug in SmartGWT.  The rest of the group should have been fixed already, but somehow, that's still happening.
8. The spacing between the header, body, and footer, is not yet adjustable.  When I hear back from the group members on a desired API, I'll implement it.
9. If you have more than 1000 different elements at the top level hierarchy, the Z-indexing won't move a menu past the first 999.  This makes the implementation cleaner, and it shouldn't be a problem.

As final points:

• With the code review starting next Wednesday, we need to get the commenting and unit testing up to snuff.
• If the template canvas overflows, it doesn't change the size of the index's canvas, so the two are different sizes.  This may be desirable for the footer, but I suspect it will ruin the alignment (which is relative, if you recall) if the overflow happens elsewhere.
• I fixed all the warnings in the client package.

Thanks,
Ian