dijit.WidgetSet methods broken or mis-designed

[alex]

the methods on dijit.WidgetSet? (and by association, dijit.registry) appear to surface array-like semantics (forEach, filter, etc.), however these methods do not take a scope parameter and do not return an array-like object. Given that many other bread-and-butter Dojo interfaces respect array-like semantics (sometimes going to great length to do so), these methods should probably be re-designed and a toArray() method (or better, basic array behavior on the base class itself) should be added to the class.

[bill]

For efficiency reasons WidgetSet? holds a hash rather than an array, since the widgets are typically accessed by id.

toArray() method was left out on purpose, to prevent users from doing something inefficient like dojo.filter(widgetSet.toArray(), ...) rather than widgetSet.filter(..).

I guess the return value from byClass() or filter() could be an array, although I want to do things like

dijit.byClass("Button").forEach(...)

which means that we need to return a souped-up array like NodeList? does, not a plain []. There should probably be support for that in dojo.

Talked to Alex about this. He said he'll make a backwards-compatible patch to support stuff like this and then (if it looks OK) I'll add to 1.0.

[bill]

PS: oh Alex said that he wants a toArray() function for debugging output. I don't mind adding it for that reason but let's name it _dumpToArray() to make it clear that people shouldn't be using it in general.

[bill]

Too late to make an API change (or even addition) for Dijit 1.1... bumping.