Evening all. Not posted in a while as I’ve plenty going on in the ‘real’ world. Anyway, last week I was building a search form whereby you could either search by reference code, or by using full search criteria.

The problem I had is that both search ‘forms’ existed on one Web Form, and I was using Validation controls to check each. So when using either submit button, both search groups were validated together. Not useful when I wanted to submit each set of controls independently of each other. So there I was, coding to disable either set of validation controls when a submit button is clicked.

“Validation groups!” I hear you cry. Yes, I know that now.

In a previous article I talked about using a library from the Zend framework to create a site search. As you try out this functionality using the search box, above right.

I never finished the article, so I’ll explain here how I implemented this using CodeIgniter. I’ll also detail how I built the ‘quick results’ tool (click in the search box).

I’ve been using Ubuntu for the past couple of years now, and have found it a perfectly viable alternative to Windows. As I mentioned in my very first post, I’m not a Linux zealot taking a political stance. It’s just a simple preference. If I was a zealot I’d be using a distribution like Gentoo, Slackware, or Linux From Scatch. One for the hard nuts, I just want something that works on my five year old laptop. I’m too tight to upgrade, so that rules out Vista. Now there’s an OS that drives Linux fundamentalism.

In an attempt to challenge my OS of choice, but still keeping within my Ubuntu comfort zone, I installed Linux Mint last week. Once slated as just a friendly, sexier version of Ubuntu, it now seems to be gaining in popularity.

I’m very impressed. I installed the OS, development IDE (Eclipse based Aptana), Apache, PHP, MySQL, and had the development version of this site up and running within a couple of hours. No messing around getting Flash, RealPlayer, and various audio/video codecs running. Anything I did need to install was a simple apt-get away in the Ubuntu repositories.

Aye, I do whitter on about jQuery. It’s ace. The newly released jQuery UI is pretty special too. One of the many great widgets is the Date Picker control.

I build many .net applications that require date entry, so I implement the Date Picker control often. Unfortunately, there is a problem when it is used on a field that is validated using a .Net validation control. Upon clicking on a date, I get the following error:

length is null or not an object

This only occurs when using Internet Explorer. Currently, my only solution is to edit the source code. Locate the following code in jquery-ui.js or ui.datepicker.js:

inst._input.trigger('change')

Replace it with:

if (!$.browser.msie){inst._input.trigger('change')}

This prevents the change event firing in IE.

I wouldn’t normally advocate changing source code in this manner, as it makes future upgrades tedious. Hopefully it will be addressed in a future release.

You place a control onto your page:

<asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="Content" Runat="Server">
	<asp:TextBox Id="Firstname" Runat="Server" />
</asp:Content>

The output is rendered as:

<input name="ctl00$Content$FirstName" type="text" id="ctl00_Content_FirstName" />

In the example above, the disparity in the rendered id attribute occurs because the TextBox control has been placed within a Content control, as the Page object inherits a MasterPage.

So how can you robustly reference the control using client-side JavaScript, regardless where the control resides? Using jQuery it’s fairly trivial:

var $firstname = $("[id$=FirstName]");

This little snippet makes use of the jQuery attributeEndsWith selector, as documented here. Bare in mind that an array is returned, as any control with an id that ends in FirstName will be selected.

I know, only a few articles in, so I don’t really need a site search function. But you never know, I might actually keep writing (even if no-one is reading) and so I’ve been looking around for some solutions.

I’ve looked at a few, for example: Swish-e, and Sphider. Nothing really float my boat, until I had a look at the Zend Framework. It’s another MVC based PHP framework, though it looks a little heavier than CodeIgniter. The documentation is not as good either, but it did have a Lucene library.

As I’ve mentioned previously I’m creating a dashboard to represent the components in the exchange that I work for. Each component widget on the page has a number of events associated with it. This has become less manageable, the more I add. So I thought about using one delegate to handle all events, and pass on a component reference, and parameters to other functions.

A quick google led me to this article by Dan Webb. Looks like a common technique. Very useful article, though I needed to be able to pass parameters to the functions. There may be a better to way to do this, but this is how I achieved it.

The JavaScript functionality that is injected into .Net pages seems limited when compared to jQuery.

Whilst looking for a way to use jQuery instead of the stock Microsoft client library, I came across this excellent article.

There doesn’t seem to be too much on Web about this subject. Maybe most .Net developers stick to Microsoft tools, but I like using jQuery for all my client scripting, and would rather not use more than one library. So as it look me a while to get example code working, I’ve included my efforts.

I’ve been asked to create a dashboard for many devices across our network. To display real-time information on each component, I’m thinking of using Web services, and AJAX. Like most aspects of coding, using a framework to do all the heavy lifting, rather than developing your own, is a sensible approach.

So today I took a look at jQuery, a JavaScript framework. I have to admit, I’m pretty impressed. It did not take me long to come up with some example code, that degrades well when JavaScript is disabled in the browser.

Evening all. This is the first post of what is sure to be many. Well, I say many, as I suspect I’ll get bored with my new toy at some point.

The main point of this site has been completed. I’ve stumbled upon one of the best lightweight frameworks I have ever used, and decided to build an application.

The framework is CodeIgniter. It uses the MVC design pattern methodology.