An old programmer’s saying, coined by Jamie Zawinski, says “Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail”. Jokes aside, email was and still is an integral part of our lives, and every web application needs to send emails to its users. This guide will walk you through all the steps to ensure every single email-sending aspect is covered. This is going to be a long article and we plan to update it often. Here are the topics, that will be covered in this…Continue Reading “A Complete Guide to Sending Emails with a Web-based Application”

People often ask us this: “I found a great-looking theme on the Internet, how do I import it into PHPRunner or ASPRunner.NET”. The problem is that all themes are implemented differently, there is no standard they follow and they cannot be “imported”. However, it is possible to make your project look exactly like any of those themes and this article will teach you how to do this.

For the inspiration, we will be using Material Dashboard Dark Edition theme by Creative Tim. Here is how it looks:

Continue Reading "How to create a beautiful dashboard theme"

When you have a long List page with dozens of records, editing or viewing a record on a separate can be cumbersome. After you edit or view a record, clicking ‘Back to List’ will display all the records from the top and you lost the position of the record you just edited. This simple technique will allow you to scroll the List page back to the original position and also it will highlight the record that was just edited or viewed. To implement this feature…Continue Reading “How to scroll List page to the record that was edited”

PHPRunner and ASPRunner.NET 10.8 are here!

Trial version download links

If you purchased PHPRunner or ASPRunner.NET less than 12 months ago, proceed to the control panel and download the registered version 10.8 there under ‘My purchases’. Use ‘Reg info’ link next to your latest purchase.

This new version features the following improvements:

1. New dashboards look and customization options

There are many ways to configure and style dashboards in version 10.8. This is just one of them.

Continue Reading "Version 10.8"

So you want to know how much time users spend on any specific page of your web application? This article explains how to log what pages your users visit and how much time they spend on each page. This kind of data can provide valuable insight into what forms of your application are too complicated and need to be split into several smaller forms. Or if they keep coming back to the welcome page this may mean your navigation inside the app can be improved.

Continue Reading "Tracking visitors behaviour in your web application"

Task – implement custom grid display in PHPRunner or ASPRunner.NET applications on mobile screens. The idea is to use the same HTML and achieve our goal using CSS only.

CSS Grid layout is nothing new and excellent tutorials are available on the web for those who want to learn more. In this article we will only cover all the relevant details to PHPRunner and ASPRunner.NET.

In this article, we will be using our Forum template as an example of using CSS Grid Layout.

Desktop version

Here is where we start. Just a regular desktop grid with all database fields occupying their own cell.

Continue Reading "Using CSS grid for mobile screens – a complete tutorial"

This is an example of work we did for one of our clients. This kind of approach will work with any AnyChart chart that PHPRunner and ASPRunner.NET do not support directly. Here is how you can approach this kind of task.

A Scatter chart is a graph that represents the relationship between two variables in a data set. Normally data is stored in the database as a set of (x,y) pairs. Here is the end result our client was looking for.

Continue Reading "Building a connected scatter chart"

The main difference no-code and low-code applications is that you can easily extend low-code applications by adding your own code. This gives you both power and responsibility and we are going to talk about some typical mistakes people do while adding their own code.

Let me show you an example of the code one our clients were using in BeforeLogin event:

Can you tell what is wrong here? If not, keep reading.

Continue Reading "Preventing SQL injection in low-code web applications"

When you build a public-facing application you need to make sure it looks sharp. In this article, we’ll show you a few ideas of how you can make PHPRunner and ASPRunner.NET projects look unique.

List page grid

Let’s start with the grid on the List page. As an example, we will be using a recently updated News template that comes with PHPRunner and ASPRunner.NET. We want to draw attention to the very first element, making it bigger than others.

Continue Reading "Building visually appealing web applications"

Welcome to DevQuest! We have built a little quest that is both fun and educational and dedicated to the topic of web development. There are eight questions total. Most of them are quite simple but some will require a bit of thinking. All of these questions can be answered with the help of your web browser and developer tools. We recommend using Google Chrome and Chrome Developer Tools but other browsers offer similar functionality.

You would need to view the page source, use Javascript console, use the Network tab in Developer Tools, use colorpicker etc. Your web browser is all you need.

Continue Reading "DevQuest contest with prizes"