ExtJS 4 - Rendering components that are initially hidden

Question

One major difference that I have noticed between ExtJS 3.x and 4.x is how the rendering/layout calculation is handled for components that are rendered inside of a containing element that has display:none (NOT an Ext created/monitored containing element). In 3.x, upon showing the containing element, the Ext component it contained would be properly rendered and sized to whatever dimensions i set for it.

However, in 4.x, that same component will not be displayed at all and have a zero height and width when its containing element was shown. After it was visible if I do a call to .setSize() it would then properly be displayed. Problem is, in my application there is just no way to be able to go through all the events that could cause a hidden component to be shown, and add code to make sure its layout is manually forced to be recalculated.

So my question is, is there any way to get back 3.x's behavior in this situation for all components across the board in 4.x?

Answer 1

What you can try to do is set up listeners on your components that delegate to the underlying DOM elements, perhaps that will solve your issue. However my suggestion is if at all possible is to use the framework to manage the entire page layout using Viewport. You can still suck in the HTML (if you must) and render it inside containers or panels for example. Perfect use case here is Header and Footer which are generated by server side code (jsp, gsp, asp..) and then displayed in the North or South regions of the Viewport using contentEl : 'myDivId' configuration.