In many cases, it is not necessary to create your own widget state class for your custom widget type. As shown earlier in this chapter, the predefined class WidgetState allows you to set the dashboard column, the widget type and the widget's rowspan. This is sufficient unless you want to put widgets of your type into the default dashboard and at the same time use a configuration other than the default. However, if you want to do just that, CoreMedia recommends that you create your own widget state class as an extension to WidgetState. For the simple search widget, the custom state class SimpleSearchWidgetState looks as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!---
    A widget state for adding simple search widgets to the dashboard
    default view.
   -->
<editor:WidgetState
        xmlns:fx="http://ns.adobe.com/mxml/2009"
        xmlns:exml="http://www.jangaroo.net/exml/0.8"
        xmlns="exml:ext.config"
        xmlns:editor="exml:com.coremedia.cms.editor.sdk.config"
        widgetTypeId="{SimpleSearchWidget.xtype}">
  <fx:Metadata>[PublicApi]</fx:Metadata>
  <fx:Script><![CDATA[
    private var config:SimpleSearchWidgetState;

    public native function SimpleSearchWidgetState(config:SimpleSearchWidgetState = null);
    ]]></fx:Script>
  <fx:Declarations>
    <!---
      The search text that is used for the collection view.
      Default "".
     -->
    <fx:String id="searchText"/>

    <!---
      The content type that is used in the content type filter.
      Default "Document_".
     -->
    <fx:String id="contentType"/>

    <!---
      Whether to restrict the search to the preferred site.
      Default true.
     -->
    <fx:Boolean id="preferredSite"/>
  </fx:Declarations>

</editor:WidgetState>

This class allows you to launch simple search widgets initially with the configuration properties searchText and contentType being set. They are set via the dashboard configuration prior to the dashboard's launch instead of being set by the user via the SimpleSearchWidgetEditor component at runtime (although this is of course possible afterwards).

The widgetTypeId for the SimpleSearchWidgetState is set to the xtype of SimpleSearchWidget. This is because widget types that extend ComponentBasedWidgetType by default take the xtype of their widget component as their id.