Everytime I edit a blog entry from the admin pages with a code sample in it... It keep screwing up the formatting.
I need to find something to edit the entries with that is a little better behaved. Maybe i'll just do it in w.bloggar at least it doesn't reformat everything when switching between HTML and preview modes.
This is a nice article on PNG opacity, too bad we actually need it, I really don't know why Microsoft chose not to include png support in IE6 like they were supposed to, hopefully they are announcing IE7 at PDC.... one can only hope.
I need to implement this hear so I can get rid of that lame mcp logo, the flat one was bad, the gif a little better, but the png looks great.
I have officially converted this blog from Drupal on Linux to DotText on Windows.
I had a small amount of trouble getting it to work right in a subdomain, but it's all functioning correctly now (I think).
I had to make some small edits to the code to accomodate my hosting service (it just needed a try/catch block for the configure page) because it didn't want to load correctly with an Empty Application name since null is not allowed I wasn't sure what to do here so the try/catch just ignor
I thought this was going to be just a standalone version of Journal and Notes combined from outlook.... Boy, was I ever wrong. I think this is going to be a constantly open, indispensible tool for me. I have
this great little capture tool that I can use to snap portions of my app at runtime (or error dialogs...), add a snippet of my code, make some highlights and annotations, then spit the whole thing out as an html
Since this project was cancelled... Does that mean it just might have moved from research into actual development? As in some of the logic making it into WinFS for Longhorn... one can only hope since there has not been much in the way of logical volume management out of Microsoft... Remember Microsoft's rule of 3s? nothing is really right until version 3...
I HATE THE CURRENT STATE OF ALL GUIS!
Yes, it's true, I think they ALL suck. Whether it be MS Windows (any version including XP), KDE, Gnome, OSX, Blackbox ...
VB
XML
and why would I want to do that?
I have an application that needs to add several database items from the same page. One reason I thought that this was a perfect solutions was this:
I have an unusual Invoice creation form. When that form starts it does some initial default things for inserting a new record, the user fills out some basic stuff, like it adds some dates and a facility for which the Invoice is from. Now that I have entered these, I don't want to loose them, and I don't want to re-order the entry because it has been optimized by watching how our users enter data for several years. Now the user needs to do a lookup for the person/company that is being billed. Sure we could list everyone in a dropdown, but this is a secure internet app and we don't want all that traffic being passed every time the page loads. Besides, it's just a bad way of doing UI to list several thousand entries in a dropdown, so what alternatives do we have? I'll just mention 3 and the reason I chose the last.
- You can use some codebehind, do a lookup and reload the page based on the results.
- You could use a popup form or a second page to do the lookup then transfer it back over to the main Invoice page.
- You can use a webservice called from javascript.
Number 1. will cause a frightening number of problems including wasted traffic reloading list items, hassles with state maintenence, blah, blah... overall just a bad solution for me. It may be the way most people are doing this but think about reloading 6 datagrids(used in place of dropdowns) and the state every time the page refreshes...
Number 2. - this was originally the method I used but it also has lots of problems, like the second page getting hidden behind the main page when a user clicks back on the main page for some reason only known to the user (users are NEVER prdictable in how they traverse documents) and then there is the whole issue of moving all the data from one page to another, sure therre are plenty of methods to do it, but none are really that great.
That leaves Number 3. I need to lookup a Customer based on their Customer ID OR Customer Name OR some other data in their record (3 other fields). This part is fairly simple, we do a sql lookup that can search multiple fields, but what if we get multiple rows as a result, or nothing is found and we want to add the Customer as a new Record?
Handling all this from a single page seems daunting or is it? Actually is really simple and elegant when you can use a webservice to return different types of data depending on what is found during the lookup. So how do we do this?
I am going to give you a whole case scenario in a later article since this was quite profound for me when I got it through testing, and into a production app. For now here are the basics:
Create your Webservice with the methods you want to call and have it return an XML Document. This document is going to be dropped into an empty <div> that we have hidden on the page, can also use IE's popups, but then you are limited to only allowing IE as a browser, same goes for <xml> tags. The xml document should have a basic structure something like this:
<mylookupresult><resulttype></resulttype><result></result></mylookupresult>
Obviously you will be tailoring it to your needs but I wanted to show some ideas of what it is capable of, the next article on this subject will be in MUCH greater detail.
Add an xml tag tou your page body to hold the results.
<xml id="xmlCustomer" />
To call the webservice we add some javascript to our form like this:
// Webservice connection
function initWebservices()
{
document.all.body.useService("InvoiceService.asmx?WSDL","CallMyWebService");
}
function DoMyLookup(value) {
document.all.body.CallMyWebService.callService(wsResult, "LookupCustomer",value);
}
function wsResult(result) {
// Insert the result into the div (this method uses IE only for now
if (!result.error) {
// stuff the result into an XML Document
document.all.xmlCustomer.loadXML(result.value);
if (document.all.xmlCustomer.documentElement) {
var xslData = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM");
xslData.async = false;
xslData.load("Customer.xslt");
document.all.divCustomer.innerHTML = document.all.xmlCustomer.transformNode(xslData.documentElement);
}else{
alert(result.errorDetail.string);
}
}
In your body's tag call the init script like this:
<body id="body" style="BEHAVIOR: url(../webservice.htc)" onload="initWebservices();">
You can do this for several results by using <div>'s and onresult="behavior..." this will also give you several asyncronous areas to pump data into on a single page.
note: You will need to download the webservice.htc behavior for it to be able to function correctly.
Now you can call the webservice from a button like this:
<input onclick="DoMyLookup(document.all.txtSearch.value);return false;" type="button" />
I use the return false so there is no event bubbling from the click.
As I said before, this is a really basic idea of how to call a webservice from javascript and leaves out alot of details, a full article is being prepared.
Have fun.
Copyright © 2003-2009 H. Steele Price, IV -
All opinions are my own, not necessarily those of my employer, your mother, or any government agency.