4.22 End of publicly available widgets views: too bad...

Question

Hello,

Just noticed that 4.22 release does not include widgets .tsx views...

It's a pity: it was really helpul to customize  widgets slighty. I remember dev summit presentations in which you did underline that views were made publicly available to help customization.

https://github.com/Esri/arcgis-js-api/tree/4.21.0/widgets (.tsx files are there)

https://github.com/Esri/arcgis-js-api/tree/4master/widgets (.tsx files are gone)

What's the motivation behind this change of policy ? What made you change your mind ?

Cheers

NicolasGIS · Answer

Hi  @AndyGup,

Many thanks for your quick reply and explanations.

To me, I always considered it as: "to be used with care and at your own risk" and not something really officially supported as there were many typescripts errors because of internal/private methods as you mentionned.

At each JS API update, I compared carrefully each change in the widgets views in order to update my "custom" widget accordingly and never had any issues. It's true that it was more time consuming but it was a choice that I found nice to have.

In addition, I find it a nice way to learn JS API idiomatics and best pratices.

AndyGup · Answer

Hi @NicolasGIS correct, the View files were deprecated at 4.21. We certainly understand the benefits they provided. One of the challenges was the View files rely on internal/private methods. Oftentimes, we unintentionally broke custom widgets when doing internal updates, so that ended up being a brittle approach that was not scalable.