NAME

Catalyst::Plugin::RapidApp::TabGui - Instant tabbed Ajax admin navigation interface

SYNOPSIS

 package MyApp;
 
 use Catalyst   qw/ RapidApp::TabGui /;

DESCRIPTION

The TabGui plugin is the primary high-level turn-key interface paradigm provided by the RapidApp distribution for top-most level GUIs (i.e. to be loaded in a full-browser, not within another interface). It provides a standard admin-style interface, based on ExtJS, with an (optional) navigation tree on the left-hand side and a tabbed content panel on the right, with an optional banner section at the top.

The content area hooks into a RESTful URL navigation scheme to load various kinds of content at public paths in the application, including both RapidApp-specific Module views as well as ordinary HTML content returned by ordinary controllers.

The interface is pure Ajax with no browser page loads whatsoever, with simulated client-side URLs triggered via the hash section/mechanism of the URL. These are fully-valid, RESTful URLs are called "hashnav paths" which start with #!/ such as:

 /#!/some/url/path

The above URL loads the content of /some/url/path with a new tab (or existing tab if already open) and works just as well if the TabGui is already loaded as accessing the url from a fresh browser window.

The TabGui is loaded at the root module, which defaults to root of the Catalyst app / for a dedicated application, but can also be changed to provide an admin section for an existing app by setting the module_root_namespace RapidApp config:

 # in the main catalyst app class:
 __PACKAGE__->config(
  # ...
  'RapidApp' => {
    module_root_namespace => 'adm',
    # ...
  }
 );

In this case, the interface would be accessible via /adm, and in turn, the previous hashnav URL example would be:

 /adm/#!/some/url/path

The TabGui is automatically loaded and configured by other high-level plugins, most notably, RapidDbic.

Thus, the following are exactly equivalent:

 use Catalyst qw/
   RapidApp::TabGui
   RapidApp::RapidDbic
 /

 use Catalyst qw/
   RapidApp::RapidDbic
 /

Additionally, there are multiple extra plugins with provide high-level functionality which assume, build upon and/or otherwise interact with the TabGui as the primary navigation interface, such as NavCore and CoreSchemaAdmin.

The TabGui plugin itself is just a configuration layer. Internally, it assembles and automatically configures a number of RapidApp modules which provide the actual functionality, including RapidApp::Module::Explorer, RapidApp::Module::Tree and others.

SEE ALSO

• RapidApp::Manual::Plugins

• Catalyst::Plugin::RapidApp

• Catalyst::Plugin::RapidApp::RapidDbic

• Catalyst::Plugin::RapidApp::NavCore

• Catalyst

AUTHOR

Henry Van Styn <vanstyn@cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This software is copyright (c) 2013 by IntelliTree Solutions llc.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.