Accessing form elements within a Spry region.

Question

Since nested Spry regions isn't yet support, can someone tell
me how to access and modify form elements within a existing region?
For example, I have a region that displays a form based on
data I defined in a javascript array. On of the form elements is a
select with some options. I want to added and remove options to
this select depending on the number of objects in the data array.
The select is not defined when I try to access it after spry
has finished rendering the form, eg
document.forms[0].selOrder1.options.length = 0;
How are Spry regions attached to the browser's DOM? Does Spry
create it's own DOM subordinate to the main DOM?
Is it possible to make changes to a Spry region without using
Spry?
thx
pwp

Answer 1

Actually, there are a couple of ways to get access to the DOM
underneath a region container. If you have a region, you can put an
ID attribute on the region container node, or if you are using a
region observer, the data passed into the observer has a regionNode
property. So if you want access to the region DOM anytime the
region is re-generated, do something like this:
function myRegionObserver(notificationType, notifier, data)
// We only want to do something after the region is
re-generated,
// for all other notifications, do nothing.
if (notificationType != "onPostUpdate")
return;
// If your region container element has an ID on it, just
use
// getElementByID. This is useful in the case where your
observer
// is only ever registered with one region.
var rgnElement1 = document.getElementById("headerRegion");
alert(rgnElement1.innerHTML);
// Or you can simply use the regionNode property of the data
// that is passed in. This is useful if you've registered
the same
// observer on multiple regions. The regionNode property
will
// contain the region container node for the region that is
currently
// being updated.
var rgnElement2 = data.regionNode;
alert(rgnElement2.innerHTML);
Spry.Data.Region.addObserver("headerRegion",
myRegionObserver);
<div id="headerRegion" spry:region="ds1">
</div>
--== Kin ==--