Question

I have an MVC app which has a Tab Panel rendered as the only item in the viewport. Within the tabs I would like to put the same type of component, for which the event handling is equal within all tabs.

Therefore I need an ExtJS MVC Controller ref to the active tab, that would lead me to execute events on the components in the active tab. Is it possible to have such a ref?

My current approach is this:

1. get reference to Tab Panel
2. call getActiveTab()
3. call the controller events for the component in active tab

Is it possible to encapsulate the above 3 steps in one controller ref? Would be beautiful 🙂

I’m using ExtJS 4.1.

Answer 1

Personally, I think controller refs are overrated. This sounds like a simple case where you can use one as you describe, but I prefer to listen to the event, and navigate from the firing component to the one I need.

In your case, assuming your tab panel contains regular ext panels, I’d do something like the following:

onButtonClick: function (button) {
    var panel = button.up('panel[tab]');

    if (panel) {
        panel.someMethod();
    }
}

The up method will find the closest ancestor that is of xtype panel and has a property named tab. If you have more specific xtypes or known properties, use those instead.

The panel should be the active one (else how was its button clicked?) but you can check that by going up another level to the tab panel and getting the activeTab there.

onButtonClick: function (button) {
    var panel = button.up('panel[tab]'),
        tabPanel = button.up('tabpanel'),
        activeTab = tabPanel && tabPanel.getActiveTab();

    if (panel && panel === activeTab) {
        panel.someMethod();
    }
}