New security providers in version 10.6

ASP.NET, News, PHP, Tutorials

Enterprise Edition of PHPRunner and ASPRunner.NET provides Active Directory authentication option. It is a useful feature but it has some restrictions, for instance, you cannot use a hybrid database/AD approach where some users will use Active Directory login and some others will have their usernames and passwords stored in the database.

This changes in version 10.6 where Active Directory is no longer a replacement for database-based login but a supplement. Active Directory is now considered a “security provider” and works the same way as “Login via Google” or “Login via Facebook”. We are also adding new security providers like OpenID, SAML, AzureAD and Okta.

This is how it works on the backend side. If you have used “Login via Google” or “Login via Facebook”, you should be already familiar with this concept. When user logs in via a third-party security provider we create a record in the users table with a unique id that for Facebook starts with fb, for Google it starts with go, and for Active Directory that prefix will be ad.

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Analyzing incoming emails

ASP.NET, PHP, Tutorials

As web developers, we deal with large amounts of data every day. Sometimes it helps to sit back and take a closer look at the data in hand and see what data is trying to tell.

Here, at Xlinesoft.com customer support is one of the most important parts of the business. We deal with a large number of emails and helpdesk tickets every day and, as a small weekend project, we decided to build a few charts to analyze those emails. We are sharing these results here and hoping that it can provide you or your clients with some insights.

First of all, we analyzed incoming support requests by the hour of the day. There is no surprise that 9am to 1pm US Eastern time is the busiest time of them all as emails from Europe and tickets from both East and West coast are coming in. We grouped those emails by the hour of the day and placed them on the world map with timezones for easy digesting.

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Password-protecting additional admin actions

ASP.NET, News, PHP, Tutorials

Some businesses may require two people to confirm certain actions like big transactions may require a supervisor’s approval. Another scenario – certain actions require entering the second password. This additional password can be changed daily and distributed among employees in the morning along with the secret handshake. Btw, the whole application doesn’t need to be password-protected, you can add the password to a certain action.

In this article, we will show how to implement this additional password security feature. We will cover two scenarios here:
1. Password-protecting custom button
2. Password-protecting editing the field in inline mode

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Show new records on the list page automatically

ASP.NET, News, PHP, Tutorials

Let’s imagine you have a web application where multiple users adding data at the same time i.e. a helpdesk application where end-users submit tickets and support staff needs to see new tickets as soon as possible. This article explains how to show new records on the page automatically without reloading the page. New records will be also highlighted to make them stand out.

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Context help in your web applications

ASP.NET, PHP

This article explains how you can implement context help in your PHPRunner or ASPRunner.NET application. Maybe you need to display some hints for users or a link to a more detailed page in the manual. If you ever checked PHPRunner or ASPRunner.NET live demo you probably noticed how it looks there: We, of course, do not want to add those messages manually to every page. Instead, we will store all those messages in the database and display the relevant message based on what page we…Continue Reading “Context help in your web applications” →

Dynamic login page background

ASP.NET, PHP, Tutorials

We have discussed the topic of making a beautiful login page in this post. What if we can take it to the next level automatically changing the login page background once a day? It is easier than you think. We are going to use of Reddit forums where people post pictures of our beautiful planet. There are communities there for every taste: cute animal pictures, wallpapers, abandoned buildings, astronomy pictures so you can find something that fits your website theme. Here is how the sample…Continue Reading “Dynamic login page background” →

Hiding details table tab on the fly

ASP.NET, PHP, Tutorials

Master-details is a very useful feature but the details table may clutter the UI. We have seen projects where people have more than a dozen details tables and it would be useful if we can hide some that are not relevant to the current master table record.

Let us take a look at this completely artificial example. A typical setup with Orders table as a master and Order Details, Employees, and Customers as details. We would like to hide the Employees table tab when OrderID is more than 10300.

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