Technically, you can just hold down the mouse button over the previous or next year (ie, 2006 or 2008) and it will "scroll" through the years just like if you pressed the down arrow at the bottom of a scrollbar.

But I can see how that might not be obvious...

Even so, the current calendar design is not ever going to be convenient for, say, someone picking birthdays several decades in the past. It's optimized for current events. Both seem to be valid designs. A month drop-down has also been a feature we've heard requested a lot, though a widget without popups may be appealing to some.

So the plan is to build a bunch of independent mixins in the dojox subproject which would enhance dijit._Calendar with features like this which the user can pick and choose from. I think popup month and year selectors would be fantastic. Shane checked in some other Calendar features which should ultimately be refactored in this manner.

I don't know if you seen the date picker in Ext JS. They have a drop down arrow next to month that replaces the date picker space with screen that has months on left side and year on right side (4 years previous, 5 years future to current year; With back and foward buttons to select the previous/next 10 years from the currently shown ones). It makes it a lot faster to select previous/future months/years.

Also are this dojox Calendar stuff available yet?

It appear that Calendar is opened up every time when the the DateTextBox gains the focus – it either the tab key or mouse click …
However, I have multiple dates fields on my page, and because of that kind of behavior usage of tabbing turns to be a heavy operation with visible delay.
But this is not the only problem – my page contain multiple dates that dependent on each other and when I want to enter the date the calendar pops up and covers the other fields that are needed to determine the value for the date that I want to enter, which forces me to get out of that box, look up the dates in other fields, memorize them and then type the date in the needed field.
Picking the date using a calendar seems is not very often needed activity ( to me it seems useful only when I need to count a number of days or weeks from a particular date). But if you just want to enter a date ( like b-day for example) then it seems that typing the date is much faster than navigating to the needed year, and therefore opening the calendar all the time seems no always justified and might be very annoying to the end user. Can we have an option to suppress that kind of behavior ( through some parameter for example) that would make look the DateTextBox and the text box, but still retaining all other functions of the DateTextBox – like Date constraints, validations and everything else that it comes with?

thanks

there are 2 options here
1 - the DateTextBox has a property called "popupClass" that is the name of the class for the popup widget. i would assume that you could set this to a class called "invisible" or something descriptive like that and then have css to set display:none for the invisible class.

2 - the DateTextBox is an extension of the ValidationTextBox so you could just use the ValidationTextBox and validate the input using the regExp field to validate.

the 'class' refers to a Dojo module, not a CSS class.