Using AOL Dojo CDN with ArcGIS Javascript API

There are at least two problems with mixing a CDN with the ArcGIS Javascript API that may be mentioned in these posts:

1. You cannot close the window without getting errors.

2. You cannot add the map to a widget created from the CDN.

This snippet address #1 by wrapping the esriDijit.findWidgets to only return defined widgets:

(function () {
  var findWidgets = esriDijit.findWidgets;
  esriDijit.findWidgets = function (x) {
    var r1 = findWidgets(x), r2 = [];
    for (var i = 0; i < r1.length; i++) {
      if (r1[i]) r2.push(r1[i]);
    }
    return r2;
  };
})();

Widgets created outside of the esriWidget scope are null in the original result.  Without this patch the calling code will fail when attempting to operate on the null values.  

I don't have a clean solution to the second problem but it is possible as long as you clean-up the ESRI widgets before the CDN widgets.  In my case I added the map to layout control:

  var mapNode = esriDojo.doc.createElement("div");

  mapNode.id = "map";

  var containerNode = new esriDijit.layout.ContentPane({ title: "ESRI Map" });

  containerNode.setContent(mapNode);

  dijit.byId("tabs").addChild(containerNode);

  var esriMap = new esri.Map("map", { extent: extent });

To avoid errors on closing the window clean up the widgets:

  esriMap.destroy();

  dijit.byId("tabs").removeChild(containerNode);

  containerNode.destroy();

Related links:

http://help.arcgis.com/en/webapi/javascript/arcgis/

http://ca0v.net/DojoLab/DojoDictionary.htm