Allow for customization of the loading message div and provide a general purpose $.mobile.showMessage() function

[dgeb]

In the first commit, I allow for a customizable class (or classes) to be defined for the loading message div instead of, or in addition to, the default of "ui-body-a". Also, $.mobile.loadingMessage can now be set to true, instead of a string, so that a spinner may appear with no associated loading message.

In the second commit, I've extracted the error message logic into a new, reusable $.mobile.showMessage() function which can be used to display any message to the user. In addition to a custom message, options such as delayTime, fadeTime, and wrapperClass can be specified.

For a demo of these customizations in action, please see http://ioumate.com

[toddparker]

The team likes the idea of adding this but we might approach it differently. Thanks for your contribution.
New issue created for this: #2044

[dgeb]

I probably shouldn't have combined both commits into a single pull request. However, I'd like to make sure that the second commit doesn't get lost, and it doesn't seem to be covered in #2044

It seems to me that there is little downside to extracting the error message logic into a new, reusable showMessage() function. Would you recommend that I extract that into a separate issue, create a new pull request with just that commit, or otherwise?

Thanks for the consideration.

[toddparker]

We definitely want to create a new plugin for message style overlays so that is planned but we just want to give the API a bit of thought so we're going for the smallest tweak we can right now to make this a bit better. Feel free to add a note to the issue about adding the theme swatch - that's what you're referring to, right?

[dgeb]

I'm actually referring to this commit: dgeb@a6de24b

This commit extracts the currently private code used to create an error message into a general purpose $.mobile.showMessage() function that is part of the API. This function takes an options object, which allows for theming as well as customization of message fade and delay times.

Here's a use case:
$.mobile.showMessage( "Your password has been updated", { delayTime: 2000, fadeTime: 400, wrapperClass: 'my-custom-notification-class' });

I've tried to provide sensible defaults so that options aren't normally needed.

To take this further, I think that $.mobile.showPageLoadingMsg() should internally call a general purpose function such as $.mobile.showMessage(). It doesn't make sense to me to have this kind of messaging logic scattered about. I'd be willing to do further work on this if the team agrees.

[toddparker]

That's exactly what we're thinking. Create a message overlay plugin that the loader can then use. Can you create a new issue to track this and start sketching out ideas for how to structure this and we can track the conversation there.

There is already a pretty robust dialog plugin here, but I think we'd probably make this simpler and more markup-focused for jQM so it's essentially a wrapper and you can drop whatever markup you want inside.
http://dev.jtsage.com/jQM-SimpleDialog/

[dgeb]

Sounds good Todd. I just created a new issue: #2045