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Asked: 2026-06-16T16:16:34+00:00

What’s the fastest way to render dijit widgets? I know that the programmatic way

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What’s the fastest way to render dijit widgets?
I know that the programmatic way is faster than the declarative. (Some reference)

I have a custom widget that loads too slowly (it’s a datagrid with combobox, buttons and other small dijit widgets used for adding filters, etc).
Looking at the source, I see that all the dijit widgets are created programmatically, but the DOM nodes where they are inserted into are created programmatically as well.
Is it the “right” way?

I’m trying to speed up the rendering of this widget, and currently my choice would be to combine a velocity template (my company uses struts2 + velocity) to create the DOM nodes, with programmatically created widgets (using placeAt and similar methods to insert the widgets into the already built DOM nodes).
It would work fine, but sadly all the css classes are overwritten by dijit, so I have to overwrite them again, which causes a sensible overhead.

In the template I write something like this:

<input id="idOfAnExistingDomNode" class="myCssClass" />

And to insert a FilteringSelect in that DOM node I have to write this:

var fieldSelect = new dijit.form.FilteringSelect({
    store : jsonStore,
    searchAttr : "caption",
    labelAttr : "caption",
    selectOnClick : true,
    value : "Content"
}, "idOfAnExistingDomNode");
fieldSelect.domNode.className += " myCssClass";

The last line is necessary because myCssClass is overwritten during the creation of the FilteringSelect.
Is there any way to avoid this issue?
Or, perhaps, I’m trying to do this thing the wrong way? I’m not completely sure about that “velocity template” thing.

Note: Dojo version is 1.5 and no, sadly we can’t upgrade it to newer versions.

Please forgive me for my TERRIBLE English.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Often one of the faster ways to instantiate widgets is to create them in a temporary div and then move that div onto the DOM. Have you tried profiling what exactly is slow in this instantiation? Part of me wonders if too much time is being spent waiting for data, as a few widgets + a grid with reasonable pagesize params shouldn’t take long to load.

    As for your class issue, it is strange that dojo is not mixing in the existing class. That said, you could do a lookup on the node first, get the class attribute, and then specify it as
    the class attribute in your mixin object when creating the FilteringSelect. If you do so, be sure you wrap class in quotes or older IE’s will reject it.

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