Nick Johnson

The time came to add "action" functionality to my article display, so that the owner of an article (or an editor) can easily click to update an article. I decided to make actions dynamic and determined by the article service, then display the appropriate links using a ListView.

Getting a list of links to display in a ListView is easy enough. The downside is that to change the contents of the text of a link, you have to include inside it a <span> element and assign to that a Label and then change the contents of that. This seemed like a lot of running around just to change the contents of a PageLink to me, so I figured I'd have a go at simply extending PageLink to something that can set the contents of the body of the link tag to any arbitrary string.

The normal way one would do this is by overriding the onComponentTagBody method, but unfortunately doing this for PageLink is impossible. For whatever braindead reason, Wicket makes onComponentTag and onComponentTagBody final inside Link.

This is incredibly short-sighted if not outright stupid. There are a myriad of reasons why someone (like me) might want to extend the behavior of a Link, including the way the <a> tag and its body are rendered. Maybe one wants to add some random Javascript behavior, change the contents of the tag body, add a dynamic title attribute, etc. All impossible because someone made these methods final (for no good reason that I can see).

Stupid.

Labels: software