Building the best web application builder, one byte at the time
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.
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.
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.
Date/time calculations can be perform either on database side or in your server side language (PHP, ASP, C#) or even in Javascript. We’ll try to cover all those scenarios.
When copying and pasting code from this article to your application replace table name (mytable) and field names (posted, dob).
Calculating age
SELECT DATE_FORMAT(NOW(), '%Y') - DATE_FORMAT(dob, '%Y') - (DATE_FORMAT(NOW(), '00-%m-%d') < DATE_FORMAT(dob, '00-%m-%d')) from mytable AS age
30 days before date
select posted, DATE_SUB(posted, INTERVAL 30 DAY) from mytable
Date plus 30 days
select posted, DATE_ADD(posted, INTERVAL 30 DAY) from mytable
Difference between two dates in days
select posted, DATEDIFF(now(), posted) from mytableContinue Reading "Date/time handling in web applications"
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”
This is a just for fun PHPRunner project for all soccer fans out there. Check this live demo first.
This project uses live World Cup 2014 data provided by http://worldcup.sfg.io/ in JSON. PHPRunner project makes the use of this data and if will not work if they website is down for any reason.
Continue Reading "Displaying World Cup 2014 data with PHPRunner."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:
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 (Javascript based) provides instant feedback to the user making it a good usability choice.
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.
If you take a look at Xlinesoft Marketplace you will find that many functions like login/register/rate are implemented in popup windows. This approach greatly improves usability, users do not need to leave the page they are on in order to logon. This article shows how to add such functionality to your PHPRunner or ASPRunner application.
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.
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”