PHP Export to Excel Snippet

2009-06-30T13:06:00-04:00

For those PHPers out there who are doing an export to Excel, I thought I'd share the solution I came up with. I realize there are already a gabillion examples out there, but I merged some of the better approaches from a few of them that made it fairly elegant, I think (such as leveraging the implode, array_keys, and array_values functions).

Without further adieux...

Small But Seriously Irritating Export to Excel Issue

2009-06-30T12:30:42-04:00

Alright boys and girls, here is an issue and its solution that had me going NUTS for a couple of hours. I actually wrote and implemented three DIFFERENT solutions trying to find a way around the problem, only to find out in the end that I kept carrying the true issue with me.

The Scenario

My user clicks a link and a window pops up allowing them to save

Disappearing IE Popup Window During Save/Open Dialog

2009-06-26T17:23:00-04:00

okay, I had a major wrestling match today when attempting to allow my users to automatically save or download a dynamically generated Excel spreadsheet, so thought I'd share the details in case it helps someone else save some hair pulling.

The Scenario

You have a page with a link on it. Clicking this link produces a popup window, the code behind it quer

Buying a New Home in San Antonio

2009-06-26T12:16:00-04:00

My wife and I have recently been involved in the search for and procurement of a new home. It started one Saturday this past April when we were driving down the hiway and on a whim decided to stop in at the Centex office in a newly developed subdivision, just to "check it out". By Sunday afternoon we had already selected the model and all of the upgrades for our new home, and were embarked upon the journey of havi

My Twelve Steps to a Coldbox App

2009-06-11T10:58:00-04:00

Yesterday I had the privilege of providing my first consultation job as an instructor on the subject of Coldbox. The team that hired me are at the stage in their project where they're ready to start writing code (database is designed, UML and usecase diagrams are complete, mockups have been created), and they wanted to "experience" my thought processes, the questions I ask myself, my approaches to implem

Create Dynamic WHERE Clauses in PHP

2009-05-21T11:40:00-04:00

At times it is necessary to dynamically create delimited lists of items, such as in the WHERE clause of SQL queries. For instance, perhaps our query could have from one to N different OR statements in the WHERE clause based on selections a user makes on a search form, something like

"select userid, firstname, lastname from usertable

Basic Ajax Select List Filter in PHP

2009-05-20T14:02:00-04:00

I am a ColdFusion guy, without a doubt. At my new job, however, I have inherited the maintenance and enhancement duties of a large PHP application as well. One of the enhancements I was asked to make was to produce a select list of names that could be filtered on the fly as the user typed into a text box. Being somewhat new to PHP and having had to figure out a good approach to creating this feature, I thought I'd share it in ca

Auto-Escaping Characters When Outputting JS Function Calls

2009-04-26T18:49:20-04:00

I'm blogging this little snippet mostly so that I have a place to find it the next time I need it, but perhaps it'll come in handy for someone else as well.

I'm creating some Javascript function calls on the fly as I output some query results. One of the parameters in the JS function is the value of an item's title which may at times contain characters JS tends to barf on, such as the single quote:

Resolution to 'Mysterious' Bash Script Error

2009-04-10T16:22:00-04:00

(to skip to the very heart of this post, click here. otherwise humor me and read until you get to it )

So I was sitting there working on a CF-based resume builder app when my boss walks in and asks me to take over responsibility for our company's database and then implement a solid backup plan and polici

Changing Scriptaculous' Sortable ID Parser

2009-03-30T11:30:00-04:00

My scenario:

I'm using Scriptaculous and CF8 to create a "stacked" PDF based on a user's re-ordering of a list of uploaded files (you can check out the live app here). In order to do this simply, I'm making the file name part of the sortable list item's ID value, like so: ID="file~#filename#" . Well, Scriptaculous has a

Hey, Did You Catch South Park Last Night?

2009-03-13T10:53:00-04:00

I can't tell you how excited I was last night when I saw the previews for South Park and saw that the Disney Channel and the Jonas Brothers had found their way into the crosshairs of the South Park writers! I myself have been a long time HATER of the Disney Channel, despising its infinitely flowing pre-pubescent stream of sickening, mind numbing garbage that's as incoherent and directionless as the pre-pubescent kids who are add

Easy Way to Grab Remote SQL Data

2009-03-12T17:47:47-04:00

Okay, this is just too cool so I thought I'd share it.

Let's say you have access to a database on a remote server somewhere, and there's data there that you would love to have a copy of locally. Options, options, options...well, if we aren't using SQL Express we have lots of options for migrating the data. But in our case, we ARE using SQL Express, so we don't have easy access to linking servers and

Using Fireworks CS4 for Interface Driven Development

2009-03-09T15:47:00-04:00

For those who are interested, I gave a 45 minute presentation at the Alamo Area CFUG last week on using Fireworks CS4 as a supplement to the Interface Driven Development methodology. I'm by no means an expert, but I do believe that what I've learned over the last several weeks might prove beneficial to other developers, especially thos

Gotta Give Adobe Kudos for Persistence!

2009-03-02T18:53:00-04:00

My trial version of Fireworks CS4 expired yesterday, so I went to the Adobe store to explore upgrade possibilities from version MX2004. I was greeted by a very nice (but suspiciously semi-robotic) sales associate named (also suspiciously based on some of the english) "Randy". I found some humor in Randy's blatant insistence that I make my purchase RIGHT NOW, so thought I'd share the short thread. In t

Presented My First Talk on ColdBox Tonight!

2009-02-04T00:41:52-04:00

In case anybody wanted to attend but was unable, I just wanted to make it known that I did present at the Alamo Area ColdFusion Usergroup meeting tonight on the topic of the ColdBox framework. I was given 45 minutes, and finished precisely within my time limits, except for a few questions at the end that I had to field.

A link to the recorded presentation can be found at UG TV ( Last night (Tuesday, January 27th, 2009) marked the birth of the San Antonio RIA User Group. We met in a large, rustic room on the first floor of JungleTech's office building. A large two story adobe-style hacienda complete with ancient oaks, hand-tiled covered patios, and a pool with a waterfall, the accommodations provided to the group lent a personable ambiance to the meeting that, in my opinion, enhanced the learning experie

Special Character/Unicode Issue in Ajax Data Retrieval

2009-01-22T22:54:35-04:00

My most recent project has caused me to have to be "unicode aware" at times (something I've never had to do before), and so I am learning a lot about encoding and display of special characters as I go along. My latest challenge related to this topic involved a User Manager section I created, wherein the users could very well have names that contain special characters (foreign names). This particular section performs it

My Yoke is Easy and My Burden is Light

2009-01-15T08:03:15-04:00

For twelve years I dedicated myself to Christianity. Not the casual, “add it to your collection of good things you lay claim to” style of Christianity; I rather gave myself to it, immersed myself in it, surrounded myself with it, and spent every waking moment working hard in one fashion or another trying desperately to achieve my understanding of what it meant to “b

Getting a Complete List of Timezones from Java

2008-12-17T07:16:11-04:00

I've been doing some research on i18n, locales, timezones, and all that jazz lately. Today I wanted to build a dropdown list of possible timezones, and came across a bit of Java code that I converted to CFSCRIPT. Thought I'd share it in case anybody else finds it useful. I will say that there are a LOT more timezones than I would have ever guessed (592 to be exact), and the results of my snippet probably aren't useful as-is to p

A Look at Male Enhancement

2008-12-16T04:03:00-04:00

Allow me to preface by saying that I am well aware that NO MALE reading this post has ever considered, imagined, entertained the remotest thought of, or especially TRIED any of the seemingly popular and wildly successful (according to Ron Jeremy) male enhancement nutraceuticals. I know this is the case...we're all fantastically pleased with our packages just the way they are; no room for improvement there. Lend me your imaginati

Movie Review: The Day The Earth Stood Still

2008-12-13T01:45:00-04:00

Okay, I did what I try NEVER to do and that is to read a movie's reviews before I go to see it. I know, that's what ratings are for, right? To help you make an informed decision about whether or not to invest the time in a particular work. But I prefer to be completely unbiased, aside from whatever impressions the previews tended to give me, before I give myself to a new film. So I did a quick google scan of some of the rev

Very Useful Snippet

2008-12-13T01:20:03-04:00

<cfset objMojito = createObject("component","bar.drink").init(glassType="24oz");

<cfscript>
objMojito.add("freshLime",.75).add("crushedIce","toFill").crushAndStir();
objMojito.add("rawSugar",2).add("crushedIce","toFill").add("puer

Using Database-Driven Configuration Settings in Coldbox

2008-12-10T15:54:00-04:00

The Scenario: My Coldbox/Coldspring/Transfer application has settings that I want to make maintainable via a user interface. Now, the Coldbox.xml.cfm file does make provision for me to add as many custom settings as I want to my app, but I don't want to require the end user to know how to edit this xml file (nor would I trust them to). I came up with a solution to this challenge that I'm really hap

Element.show/hide anomoly in Prototype

2008-12-10T14:49:00-04:00

I am a lover of the Prototype Javascript framework, I must say. But today I found a rather irritating little tidbit that diverted my attention from "real" work. Thought I'd share it just in case it saves someone else a little hair pulling.

The Scenario: You have a button that, onClick, performs an Ajax.Updater call. For aesthetic reasons, you have a hidden div with a spinn

Coldbox Interceptors and Custom Interception Points Demystified

2008-12-07T02:32:28-04:00

Although ANYTHING you could ever want to know about coldbox is definitely in its documentation, I find that it is still necessary sometimes to have to piece things together bit by bit..."...line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little:...." as the prophet Isaiah said... in order to fully comprehend them. In this post I'd like to share what I have distilled from the docs regarding the subject of usi

Auto-Synchronizing Your SQL DB Across Multiple Development Machines

2008-11-26T19:43:00-04:00

Building upon my last post regarding the setup of dual development environments and how to keep them in sync, this time I want to focus on keeping the development database in sync and how I have approached it.

In my setup, I have an office PC and a home laptop, both running SQL Express as my database server. The goal: to have all changes performed from either location be reflected on both. Here's a

Multi-Worksite Productivity Configuration

2008-11-23T16:20:02-04:00

I am a self-employed individual. It wasn't until just last month, however, that I actually procured an "away from home" office space. It was at that point that I began to ponder the logistics of working at an office AND being able to work from home as well. How would I keep files in sync? How would I be able to do a day's work from home and then do a couple more hours at night without accidentally overwriting something

I Have a Dream....

2008-11-22T12:41:53-04:00

The collective abilities of the many always surpass the few. This is common knowledge, and pervades every aspect of life so much so that we probably don't even take note of it. A pride of lions takes more game than one hunting solo; the most correct answer is the distillation of many people's opinions rather than that of a single individual; the list could go on ad finitum. So why then is it that so many people who catch the ent

TinyMCE Refusing to Display Icons

2008-11-18T13:17:00-04:00

Okay, this post is as much informative as it is a rant, so bear with me while I vent as I share.

Let's talk TinyMCE. Typically I use FCKEditor, but for my current project I'm going with TinyMCE. How hard can it be, right? An editor is an editor is an editor. I download it, I add the two simple lines needed to transform my textarea into a full blown editor, and voila: it's an editor. But the men

My First Excursion into using Ajax with Coldbox

2008-11-15T01:22:00-04:00

I had my first successful forray using Ajax in Coldbox today! After reading a LOT, checking out some examples, and then letting my natural developer's instinct take its course, I ended up with a design that left me really wondering if I had taken a wrong turn or had a moment of brilliance . As I said, it works great, but is it an ideal pattern to use or did I cross one of those invisible "development ethics" lines with

Doug Boude (rhymes with 'loud')