Question

I’ve got an ember application that needs to manage multiple chat windows. A window for each active chat is created within an {{#each}} loop. This is straightforward enough. The place that I’m having trouble is sending the chat message when the user presses enter.

The window looks like this

{{#each chats}}
    ... stuff to display already existing chats...
    {{view Ember.TextField valueBinding="text" action="sendChat"}}
    <button {{action sendChat this}}> Send </button>
{{/each}}

This works fine for the button, since I can pass this to it. By default the function defined in the textfield view action just gets the text within that textfield, which is not enough in this case. Since there can be multiple chat windows open, I need to know which window the message was typed into. Is it possible to pass this to the textfield action function? (or can you suggest a different way to solve this problem?)

Answer 1

Add contentBinding="this" to the definition of the view, like:

{{view Ember.TextField valueBinding="text" action=sendChat contentBinding="this"}}

EDIT

Ember master already has this change, but the official downloadable verstion still don’t.. so you will need to subclass the Ember.TextField and change its insertNewline to achieve required functionality:

App.ActionTextField = Em.TextField.extend({
    insertNewline: function(event) {
        var controller = this.get('controller'),
        action = this.get('action');

        if (action) {
            controller.send(action, this.get('value'), this);

            if (!this.get('bubbles')) {
                event.stopPropagation();
            }
        }
    }
});

After that, the action handler will receive additional argument, the view:

{{view App.ActionTextField valueBinding="text" action=sendChat myfieldBinding="this"}}

and in controller:

sendChat: function (text, view) {
    var myField = view.get('myfield');
    //do stuff with my field
}

You may use ember master instead of subclassing Ember.TextField..

I hope the ember guys will release the next version soon..