PHPRunner 8, ASPRunnerPro 9 and ASPRunner.NET 8 added an option to use multiple database connections in single project. This article explains how you can access data from multiple databases in your events.
Fairly often we want to split long forms into several steps letting users fill a few fields on each step. Besides making a long form easier to fill out for your users you can also save partial results between pages.
Here is how this can be done in PHPRunner, ASPRunnerPro and ASPRunner.NET.
Lets assume we have Cars table with about 20 fields and we want to split Add/Edit pages into three steps.
1. Create two custom views
Create two custom views (Cars1 and Cars2) based on Cars table
Most popular websites like Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, LinkedIn etc provide an API that allows to retrieve or post data programmatically. API examples come in many programming languages and PHP is usually one of them. In this article we’ll show how easy is to add API calls to your PHPRunner project.
Lets start by adding Twitter posting functionality. We’ll be using a lightweight twitter-php library for this purpose. Similar libraries exist for other languages as well.
1. Setup a developer account with Twitter.
A quote from twitter-php usage page:
Continue Reading "Using third party API in PHPRunner apps. Playing with Twitter."Sign in to the http://twitter.com and register an application from the http://dev.twitter.com/apps page. Remember to never reveal your consumer secrets. Click on My Access Token link from the sidebar and retrieve your own access token. Now you have consumer key, consumer secret, access token and access token secret.
Happy Halloween everyone! Just a little Halloween fun project. To make your website more interesting you can choose to display a random background image for each visitor. Here is how it’s going to look: How to add this functionality to your project. 1. Download a set of sample images and unzip it to the output folder keeping directory structure. This should create a folder named backgrounds with a few images in there. You are free to add more images or to remove any you don’t…Continue Reading “Random page background: Halloween edition”
PHPRunner 8.0/ASPRunnerPro 9.0/ASPRunner.NET 8.0 are here. Purchase info and download links.
Click any image to see the full size screenshot.
Major new features
- Dashboards
- Multiple database connections (part of Enterprise Edition)
- Import page with columns mapping
- New Printer page/PDF options (portrait/landscape, fit to page, scale)
PHPRunner 7.0 and ASPRunnerPro 8.0 add a new new ‘Custom CSS’ feature – an easy way to modify the appearance of your pages adding bells and whistles Style Editor doesn’t support. Lets see how we can build a custom login page similar to this one:
Major new features
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Add CSS rules manually in Style Editor to build professionally looking pages. Take a look at this customized login page: page background, input controls and Facebook button appearance were adjusted via CSS rules added in Style Editor. Click this image to open sample app in browser.
Data validation helps prevent incomplete, incorrectly formatted or otherwise invalid data from being saved. PHPRunner provides several ways to validate user input, from built-in field rules to custom JavaScript and server-side validation.
The right approach depends on what you need to check. Simple requirements such as mandatory fields can usually be handled with built-in validation. More complex business rules may require custom code.
A useful rule is to distinguish between user experience and data integrity. Client-side validation gives users immediate feedback, but important rules should also be enforced on the server before data is saved.
Continue Reading "Data Validation in PHPRunner: Client-Side and Server-Side Options"Custom Edit controls let you replace a standard field input with a specialized control while keeping it integrated with PHPRunner Add and Edit pages.
This article explains the underlying plugin structure using ColorPicker and SignaturePad as practical examples. It covers the PHP and JavaScript parts of a control, adding CSS and other assets, passing settings, validation and installing the finished plugin in PHPRunner.
Looking for a faster way to create a new control? You can also use the PHPRunner custom Edit controls skill with ChatGPT to generate the PHP, JavaScript, CSS and supporting files for a new control. See Building a World Cup Prediction Challenge in PHPRunner, especially the section about creating custom Edit controls with ChatGPT.
We plan to release a beta version of new PHPRunner and ASPRunnerPro in August-September 2012. Here are some of new features you can expect in this update.
New file/image upload control
- select and upload multiple files at once. You only need one database field to store all file names.
- customizable list of allowed file extensions
- max number of files
- file size restriction (for each file individually and total upload size)
- customizable path to upload folder. May contain PHP variables. No need to write events code if you want to save each user’ files to separate folder. Sample upload path: $_SESSION[“ProjectID”].”/”.$_SESSION[“UserID”]
- Drag-n-drop upload – drag files from your desktop right to web page
Upload settings:
