Drawing a user interface based on preferences

Question

I want to use the built-in preference system for my xulrunner (Firefox) application. But I can't figure out how to easily drive the user interface based on preferences.

The user can specify a list of home pages, and each home page will show up in a different tab. Because the tabs are in the presentation layer, I'd like to create them using a template in the xul code. Is this possible?

I haven't seen a way to do this with xul templates. Is there an alternative templating system that would allow me to change the UI based on user preferences?

Answer 1

No, templating in XUL is not powerful enough, so you're stuck with writing JavaScript code that reads the preferences and opens the needed tabs.

Answer 2

XML.prototype.function::domNode = function domNode() {
    function addPrefix(prefix, name) {
        if (typeof(prefix) == "undefined" || prefix == null || prefix == "") {
            return name;
        } else {
            return prefix + ":" + name;
        }
    }

    function recurse(xml) {
        var domNode = document.createElementNS(xml.namespace().uri, addPrefix(xml.namespace().prefix, xml.localName()));

        for each (let attr in xml.@*::*) {
            let attrNode = document.createAttributeNS(attr.namespace().uri, addPrefix(attr.namespace().prefix, attr.localName()));
            attrNode.nodeValue = attr;
            domNode.setAttributeNode(attrNode);
        }
        if (xml.hasComplexContent()) {
            for each (let node in xml.*) {
                domNode.appendChild(recurse(node));
            }
        } else if (xml.hasSimpleContent()) {
            domNode.appendChild(document.createTextNode(xml));
        }
        return domNode;
    }

    return recurse(this);
};

var name = "example"
var xml = {name};

document.querySelector("#example-statusbar-panel").appendChild(xml.domNode());

works as a charm, there's some minor glitches with namespaces though.

You could always convert dom back to XML with

var str = serializer.serializeToString( xml.domNode() );