Where to put state that's needed by different GWT activities?

Question

I'm currently working on a GWT application and I'm still a little fuzzy on how it all fits together (the joy of having to make changes without first coming to an understanding of the whole framework, although that might be difficult anyway).

We have a few Activities that all correspond to parts of the UI (e.g. main content, a toolbar and a list of things). I'm not really sure whether that's even how Activities are intended but I guess I can't really change that easily now. My problem now is that the list of things holds state (the current selection) that the main content also needs and in a way the toolbar too (at least the toolbar currently has it – I'm beyond asking).

But what would actually be an appropriate place to store that? I guess coupling the actual view implementations together and storing the selection only in the list isn't such a bright idea.

Answer 1

I see two main solutions here:

• keep the state within each activity and keep them synchronized through events (on the EventBus). That is: the "list of things" has a current selection, main view has one too, so does the toolbar; and each time that value changes, the activity that's making the change fires an event on the event bus so that the other activities can update their state, so that all activities have the same value in their own state.

• use a singleton object (if you're using GIN and dependency injection, simply annotate the object with @Singleton and inject it in all the activities) to keep the state at a central place. The activities register event handlers on the state holder object to be notified when it changes. That is, each time an activity calls setCurrentSelection (for example), an event is fired (for example a ValueChangeEvent), and because all activities listen for it, they can update their view or whatever depending on the new value. You can choose to either dispatch the event on the event bus (similar to the PlaceController) or have the state holder implement HasValueChangeHandlers. Just make sure to unregister the handlers when the activities stop to avoid memory leaks (dispatching on the event bus makes it easier: simply register the handlers on the bus passed as argument to the start method and they'll be unregistered automatically when the activity stops, and you don't even have to think about it).

Actually, PlaceController is a good example of such shared state (the current place).