What is the best way to do this in ASP.NET MVC3? - asp.net-mvc-3

I want to have a form which has a simple 2 step process:
(If a person on has one school assigned to them then skip straight to step 2)
Step 1 - Select a school from a drop-down list
Step 2 - Enter the required data from a data-entry form. Certain fields are disabled based on which school was selected.
I have had a look at the various methods for creating 'wizards' and at using partial Views. What is the best way to handle this? I was wondering if using AJAX is worthwhile considering or just having a two step process in the form.
James :-)

You should absolutely do this via ajax so your options are either
use small partial views. your view logic determines what to disable/enable
(probably easier and more lightweight) use json to get a list of property names to disable.Then you can simply disable them via jQuery ideally by iterating through each item with the .each() call.
See: looping through JSON array in a jQuery list
for a use of the each call.
got jQuery getJson, see: http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.getJSON/
so:
1. getJson to get the results from a controller
2. enumerate using .each() and set the property
$("#" + yourFieldName).attr("disabled","disabled");

Related

Laravel, custom functions in for views

I am having someone create a bunch of templates (themes) for a website, and want to keep data passed to the views flexible.
For example, with the users in the system I want to be able to supply the top x users and the most recent x users. In my controller I don't want to pass this data to the view, because he might just need the top 5 users and I am querying the top 10 - or worse, I might only get the top 5 and he wants the top 10.
I am thinking there would be two ways to do this.
1 - A view "helpers" file, which could contain functions like. getTopUsers($count) and getNewestUsers($count) which would do the model / repo call.
2 - Create a view presenter to keep these extra functions. I've had a look and there seems to be two main presenter packages - https://github.com/ShawnMcCool/laravel-auto-presenter and https://github.com/laracasts/Presenter
Maybe there is a better way?
There could be half a dozen of these, for various models...
I would pop some client side code into your views and access a route to a controller action (which returns JSON by default) and conditionally add that particular snippet into your view (via a variable passed to the view that determines if the person is logged in). Then you can apply an auth filter to your route to protect it.
Note: with this approach you can pass url parameters to your action. This means you can tell your controller to limit your results more easily.
This is a very interesting question, my friend. What I can think of is the following
1) cheap way, just query 10 or whichever the biggest number, and then pass a variable $count to the view or let view pass a variable to the sub view
2) api call, if you'd like to do AJAX call, then as others suggested, you could just design a new route, getData?count=5.
Normally it's not easy to meet all requirements, and practically speaking in the prototype stage, it'll be more cost-effective to write fixed function like getData5, and getData10, or just make two pages :) it'll be a lot faster than coming up another new architecture design and then realize in the end nobody really uses them.

How to load the jqgrid in a selector with context

In general we call the jqgrid as in$("#grid_loc").jqGrid({});
But i want to specify the context like $("#grid_loc",context).jqGrid({}). But this is not working. Can somebody help in this?
I have to load server side data using url option.
Infact i occured to have this, as i have tabs on my page.
In each tab, i have to have a jqgrid, not different grids but same grid with different data .
Here i am getting the tab context using var tabset = $("div.tabset");
newdivid = $("div[class*='active_tab']",tabset).attr("id");
var newmenudivid = $("#"+newdivid);
And
the grid code as
$("#grid_workflow", newmenudivid).jqGrid({....});
I have been trying to find out a way to do this. you can find some of my effort in the comments section of the link
how to develop same jqgrid in multiple tabs
i was successful with id overwriting for the same purpose. But that is not a good way though. So i am forced to have another approach ie. context
I suppose that you misunderstand some important things which corresponds to id attribute. The most important that all elements on the page having id attribute have to have unique value of the attribute. In other words the ids have to be unique over the whole HTML page.
So if you need create for example tree grids inside of tree tabs you have to define different id attributes for every grid. For example; grid_workflow1, grid_workflow2, grid_workflow3. If you create the tabs and grids dynamically then you can have some variable in the outer scope (for example global variable) and increase the value of the variable. You can construct id of the grid using some prefix (like "grid_workflow") and the value of the variable. In the way you can create multiple grids with unique ids. Many JavaScript libraries uses the way to generate unique id attribute. Ij you want you can use $.jgrid.randId() method which will returns you unique strings which can be used as ids.
Because of the syntax $("#grid_workflow", newmenudivid) you should understand one important thing. I would recommend never use it. The reason is very easy. It could help only if you have id duplicates. In all other cases if will works exactly like $("#grid_workflow") but slowly. The reason is easy to understand. Web browser hold internally the list if all ids on the page and if you use getElementById method directly of indirectly (in $("#grid_workflow")) the searching of the element with the required id will be like searching in the index in the database. So you will have best performance results. If you use $("#grid_workflow", newmenudivid) then you don't allow web browser to use the index of elements by id. So the usage of context will follow to slow searching throw all children elements of newmenudivid. So you should avoid usage of jQuery context with id selectors.

Ruby on Rails using tabs

everyone!
At first, I made a single form with large amount of elements: text fields, text areas and so on. When I had got the form ready, I understood that it is not so user-friendly to have such a large form to be filled-in in a row. I don't want to use the "step" system (step 1 -> step 2 -> ... -> step n), because I want for the end-user to be able to have this form filled in any order (+ User would be able to see beforehead what forms he would need to fill), so I divided the form into the several tabs.
The idea is following: once user has filled the form in some tab, he hits the "Save" button and proceeds to the next one (in arbitrary order of his choice).
The thing I wanted to know - what would be the best approach to store the intermediate data ? Should I have some hidden input for each of the tab forms with tab-id to be passed to the model, so that at each 'step' only tab relevant data was validated and stored in DB. Or, maybe, I should have a session[:object] that would contain the current object and at the very end I would store it in DB and erase from the session.
Can this idea be realised ?
Thanks in advance! :)
there's a gem called wicked, it allows you create wizards in a very simple way, check it out
I'm not a ruby ninja, but in other languages (like php) we usually use sessions to do this. Why not to do this on rails?
Also you can consider creating a table for "temporary storage rows" in addition of using sessions, so every time you change the page you could save the data to that table and, at the end, save them all to your main tables.
This is useful if you usually loose your session... you can related the temporary storage rows with the user and if he looses the session, you can restore his uncompleted forms from your database.
You could simply go the Railscasts 217 - Multistep form approach, which works fine.
However, this may not suit you as you may only store the data AFTER you have everything collected, and not step by step.
Another solution - as you mentioned - would be using e.g. jQuery tabs to create your form steps and building a little validation via AJAX / backbone.js before storing the actual record with all its data.

Jquery/Ajax/HTML assistance needed

I am trying to build a very basic message center. My idea is to use Jquery to make an ajax call to a classic asp page that will build a Json array.
I then plan to use Jquery to grab that Json.
My main questions currently are:
Is it possible to empty out a multi select input list?
Would it be better to not use the input at all and build a nifty Jquery list?
Will using Ajax allow me to on the fly empty this list; replace with with different information and/or append items to this list all without a page refresh?
I need to be able to allow the client to select multiple people from this list. Is my outline above feasible?
Is it a good way to achieve what I am looking for?
I have very little experience with Json and Ajax, and was hoping someone could confirm if it was possible before I dive in.
Is it possible to empty out a multi select input list?
Yes
Would it be better to not use the input at all and build a nifty Jquery list?
You can have this work with any kind of element, including a standard input.
Will using Ajax allow me to on the fly empty this list; replace with with different information and/or append items to this list all without a page refresh?
Yes, in a function that handles the response of the Ajax call and uses call's result to populate the list. Since you're using Ajax, the call is asynchronous so the entire page will not be refreshed as a result of your call.

Is There A Downside To Calling Models From Helpers In CakePHP?

A bit of context: I need to cache the homepage of my CakePHP site - apart from one small part, which displays events local to the user based on their IP address.
You can obviously use the <cake:nocache> tag to dictate a part of the page that shouldn't be cached; but you can't surround a controller-set variable with these tags to make it dynamic. Once a page is cached, that's it for the controller action, as far as I know.
What you can usefully surround with the nocache tags are elements and helpers. As such, I've created an element inside these tags, which calls a helper function to access the model and get the appropriate data. To get at the model from the helper I'm using:
$this->Modelname =& ClassRegistry::init("Modelname");
This seems to me, however, to be a kind of iffy way of doing things, both in terms of CakePHP and general MVC principles. So my question is, is this an appropriate way of getting what I want to do done, or should it ring warning bells? Is there a much better way of achieving my objectives that I'm just missing here?
Rather than using a Helper, try to put your code in an element and use requestAction inside of the element.
see this link
http://bakery.cakephp.org/articles/gwoo/2007/04/12/creating-reusable-elements-with-requestaction
This would be a much better approach than trying to use a model in your helper.
Other than breaking all the carefully-laid principles of MVC?
In addition to putting this item into an element, why not fetch it with a trivial bit of ajax?
Put the call in its own controller action, such that the destination URL -> /controller/action (quite convenient!)
Pass the IP back to that action for use in the find call
Set the ajax update callback to target within the element with the results of the call accordingly
No need to muck around calling Models directly from Views, and no need to bog things down with requestAction. :)
HTH

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