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

Continue Reading "How to split Add/Edit pages into several subpages"

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:

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.

Continue Reading "Using third party API in PHPRunner apps. Playing with Twitter."

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

  1. Dashboards
  2. Multiple database connections (part of Enterprise Edition)
  3. Import page with columns mapping
  4. New Printer page/PDF options (portrait/landscape, fit to page, scale)
Continue Reading "PHPRunner 8.0/ASPRunnerPro 9.0/ASPRunner.NET 8.0"

Data validation is very important in web applications. You do not want your users to enter incorrect data. Our web application builders can help you with this.

In this article we cover different validation type starting with built-in validation and making it all the way through to advanced AJAX-based validation.

Client-side validation

Client side validation (Javascript based) provides instant feedback to the user making it a good usability choice.

Built-in validation types

This validation will work if you need to make sure that all required fields are populated or validate a relatively simple data format like US Social Security Number.

Continue Reading "Validation in PHPRunner and ASPRunnerPro applications"

PHPRunner 6.2 and ASPRunnerPro 7.2 add an exciting new feature – custom edit controls. You are longer limited by stock Edit controls that come with the software. And the best of all, creating new Edit controls is not complicated and we’ll show how this can be done.

We will show you how to create ColorPicker and SignaturePad plugins. Before we proceed I recommend to check the following live demo that showcases both edit controls plugins. SignaturePad control works on mobile devices as well.


Continue Reading "How to create your own Edit control plugin"

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:

Continue Reading "Preview of new features in PHPRunner 6.2 and ASPRunnerPro 7.2"

In this article we will be focusing on debugging and troubleshooting the JavaScript errors. We will look at few examples to illustrate the methods used. For this purpose we will be using developers tools that come with Chrome browser. If you use Firefox – download and install the Firebug. Firebug is an extension to Mozilla Firefox web browser which allows us to monitor and debug the JavaScript in any web page. var ctrlPrice = Runner.getControl(pageid, ‘Price’); var ctrlQuantity = Runner.getControl(pageid, ‘Quantity’); var ctrlTotals = Runner.getControl(pageid,…Continue Reading “How to troubleshoot Javascript errors”