Web and WebWorks Development

[cucipa]

Hello,

I have a Widget that accesses some remote pages, much like a browser, and now I want to link back to the previous page, or the starting page, when I press the back button.

How can I link the back button to the last page visited? It might be possible using an invoke on the app itself, however, that means that all external pages I access must have access to the BB Widget API - and that may not be the case.

I noticed that in one of the Widget examples, the javascript bounces the user to the calendar, and if you press the back button when in the Calendar, it brings you back to the Widget. How is that achieved?

Thank you,

Paul

[tneil]

Hi there,

In the Beta 2 release of the BlackBerry Widget packager, the default action for the "Back" button is to do a general browser style back through the history.  If it is the first page viewed in the widget and no more history is available to move back through, it will close the widget.

In the Beta 1 release, the default action of the back button is to exit the application unless you override it.

This should give you a solution for what you are looking for.  A Beta 2 release is just around the corner

[tneil]

As a follow up note, also know that BlackBerry widgets do not have caching enabled yet so going back through history will pull the content again from the URL.

I know.. not the greatest, but know that we are working on all of these features.

[britishturbo]

I hope this Beta2 comes out soon... sounds like it's got some much needed features!

[cucipa]

Thanks Tim,

We were actually wondering about caching, as one option had us compile JavaScript toolkits inside the BlackBerry Widgets to increase speed. YUI seems to work, however with some quirks. ExtJS fails on the BlackBerry browser.

Is there a ToDo list or expected features list, that will show us what RIM is doing? We would be able to make better decisions on what to focus when learning the Widget API, and not spend so much time looking for workarounds.

Thank you very much,

Paul

[tneil]

Hi Paul,

We definitely will be discussing this road map down at the BlackBerry Developer Conference.  We have an entire session on where we are planning on taking this technology and will be having onsite surveys so that everyone can vote on what functionality is most important to them.

[venkatraman]

Some of thoughts on this same topic.

It would be great to have the option, at an application level, to "Turn-off Cache".

BlackBerry Widget SDK and Cache.