Updating tag attributes in design time

Question

I have a design time renderer for my custom component... As the component renders itself in design time, I set some of the component properties from within the renderer... The property sheet correctly shows those values... However, the associated JSP tag in the source view does not show those attributes... The JSP tag attributes dictate the runtime behavior and since they are not set properly, my component misbehaves.
How do I make sure that the tag attributes sync up with the property sheet values?
Also, what is the motivation behind the property sheet displaying the component values and not the JSP tag values? Having it the way it is right now opens itself up to a bunch of out-of-sync problems like the one I encountered.
Thanks,
Keyur

Answer 1

Ok - here are a couple of scenarios:
1. I have a component, say chart component associated with a connection component like this:
<my:connection id="connection1" />
<my:chart connectionId="connection1" />The user first drags and drops the connection component. The ID connection1 is automatically associated to it. Next he drops the chart component. Now, I would like to automatically populate the connectionId attribute without the user having to type it in manually. I am able to do that (in design time) in the renderer of the chart component - I programmatically look for a connection component on the page and set the connectionId attribute of the control. And when I do that it correctly shows the connectionId attribute populated in the property sheet but the corresponding tag attribute is not.
Sure enough, at runtime, it is the tag attribute values that count and since those are not updated by the IDE, it does not work as expected.
2. Creator updates the style attribute when I move or resize the component. Now, I also have position attributes left and top defined on my component and I use these attributes at runtime to position my component. So, in design time I extract the left and top values from the style attribute and set them on the component. But again, the tag attributes are not populated and so the component is not positioned properly.
#1 is to convenience the user so that he doesn't have to manually enter values for attributes which can be automatically populated at design time.
In fact for #1, I would ideally like to show the user a drop down list of all the connections available to him in the property sheet and select the first one by default. Is this possible?
#2 is for backward compatibility reasons - We already have runtime renderers in place which use left and top attributes explicitly to render the components at runtime. And this is not restricted to left and top only but other client attributes as well - such as borders, backgrounds etc. which we expose as separate attributes.