Making widget a child of new widget

Question

Here is the situation. My company has some widget controls that have been in place for a year or so. I am being asked to add a "search function" to the widget. Up to this point, the widget is on a page where the field is being passed into it via a cookie. So my question is this, is there a way to create new widget that inside the template it references the old widget and assigns its properties at run time?

Here is some sample

dojo.provide("company.billing.paymentSearch"); 
dojo.require("dijit._Widget"); 
dojo.require("dijit._Templated"); 
dojo.require("company.test.inquiry"); 

dojo.declare( 
    "company.billing.paymentSearch", 
    [dijit._Widget, dijit._Templated], 
{ 
    token: "", 
    serviceUrl: "", 

    templatePath: dojo.moduleUrl( 
        "company.billing", 
        "templates/paymentSearch.html" 
    ), 

    constructor: function(params, node) { 
        var self = this; 

        function onLoad() { 
            self.inquiryWidget.token = self.token; 
            self.inquiryWidget.serviceUrl = self.serviceUrl; 
            self.inquiryWidget.brandId = ""; 
            self.inquiryWidget.agencyAccountNumber = ""; 
            self.inquiryWidget.billingAccountNumber = ""; 


            self.paymentWidget.token = self.token; 
            self.paymentWidget.serviceUrl = self.serviceUrl 
        } 

        dojo.addOnLoad(onLoad); 
    }, 
    paymentSearch: function() { 
        var self = this; 
        self.inquiryWidget.billingAccountNumber = self.accountNumber; 

    } 
} 
); 

then my template would be

<div>
<div style="float:left; width:20%; border: 1px solid #CCCCCC;">
    <center>
                    Make a Payment 

    </center>
    <br />

        Account Number 

    <br />
    <input style="width:85%" type="text" dojoattachpoint="accountNumber" />
    <br />
    <div class="searchButton">                                

    </div>
</div>
<div style="float:right; width:79%">
    <div id="inquiryWidget" 
        dojoType="company.billing.inquiry" 
        billingAccountNumber="" 
        agencyAccountNumber="" 
        brandId="" 
        waitPanelText="Loading ..." 
        showAccountSummary = "true" 
        showAccountHistory = "false" 
        token="" 
        serviceUrl="">
    </div>  
</div>        

What I would like to do is on the onclick of the search button, add properties to the inquiryWidget and start it. Is something like this possible?

Answer 1

You can programatically create the widget like this:

in the template:

<div id="inquiryWidget" dojoAttachPoint="inquiryNode">

in the onLoad function:

function onLoad() {
    self.inquiryWidget = new company.billing.inquiry({  
        token: self.token, 
        serviceUrl: self.serviceUrl 
    }, self.inquiryNode);
}