lack of textarea support is EXTREMELY disappointing

I note with great amusement that the "new topic" form includes a textarea (the one I am typing this rant in), but the form is in html and does not use any of the AW controls.

I wish I had not wasted so many hours trying to use AW. I was enamored with the grid, which is great as a standalone. But it is extremely difficult to integrate it with html elements like a textarea. A reasonable person would presume it would not take hours to develop a workaround the absence of a textarea. Yes, you have partially implemented it, but why you would have presumed that users would not want to set the tabIndex using the setTabIndex method that is available for all other AW controls is a complete mystery. Here's my code:


var textareaQuestionText = new AW.System.Control;
textareaQuestionText.setTag("TEXTAREA");
textareaQuestionText.setId("textareaQuestionText");
textareaQuestionText.setTabIndex(3);

The setTabIndex method doesn't do anything. Of course, I don't know why I would presume this method would work when I can't get the contents of a textarea in the standard way. Instead I have to get the contents by:

textareaQuestionText.element().value

That piece of information was very well-hidden but I managed to find it. One would then presume that perhaps setting the tabIndex thusly would work:

textareaQuestionText.element().tabIndex = 3;

However, that crashes the form.

Here's what I think:

The grid is fantastic, but integrating in html it is cumbersome. The API documentation is almost impossible to use. Look at any other API documentation to compare.

This *should be* a trivial thing to implement. There should be SO MANY examples to cannibalize. But there are not.

I would love to hear a counter-argument to the above. I would love to be able to use the grid control, but I don't see how I can at this point.

Thanks,

Ed

I solved my problem with this:

textareaQuestionText.setAttribute( "tabIndex", 3 );