Registered Ajax Responders Not Responding Properly

2010-02-19T11:20:00-05:00

If you use the Prototype Javascript library and you chain your Ajax calls together at times, you may have run into the issue that I just dealt with regarding your registered responders not responding correctly! Since I spent more time than I care to share trying to figure out why my global responders weren't working like I thought they should, I thought I'd share what I learned. Hope it saves somebody some time! :)

Auto-Escaping Characters When Outputting JS Function Calls

2009-04-26T18:49:20-05:00

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:

Special Character/Unicode Issue in Ajax Data Retrieval

2009-01-22T22:54:35-05:00

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

Element.show/hide anomoly in Prototype

2008-12-10T14:49:00-05:00

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

TinyMCE Refusing to Display Icons

2008-11-18T13:17:00-05:00

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

Elegant Approach to Disabling Submit Button on Forms

2008-11-04T17:55:00-05:00

A while back I had a project that required the submit button of the login form to be disabled unless both the username field AND the password field had values. There are probably several ways to skin that cat, but my good friend Boyan Kostadinov offered a more elegant solution (he's always good for the most elegant approach!), and I thought I'd share it with whoever else may benefit.

This solution u

Viewing Option Text (in IE7) that's Wider than the Select List

2008-05-14T11:31:00-05:00

Though a "minor" cosmetic issue at times, it can be challenging to come up with creative ways to accommodate what I consider to be IE's shortcomings regarding the control of form items, in particular select lists. With at least one project I'm currently working on, I have a select list that lives in a fixed width div, yet there are times when the text values of the options are wider than the div itself. The client respect

Client-Side Drilldowns Made Easy

2008-03-09T22:46:00-05:00

Last September I shared a post on an alternative to Ajax for client-side interactivity leveraging Coldfusion's WDDX. I'd like to take it a step further now and share an approach (and corresponding code) I often use in my Model-Glue apps when needing to create tiered or drilldown-type select lists withOUT having to make numerous ca

DEMYSTIFYING JSON (for myself)

2007-07-05T17:50:00-05:00

I'm doing this post because the term 'JSON' has continued to appear here and there within blog posts, conference sessions, articles, and emails that I consume as part of my professional growth regimen. Despite the fact that the term is so very often mentioned casually as if everybody has known about it since Kindergarten, the greater part of my understanding of JSON is barren except for the few clues I have man

Using Ajax with Model-Glue - it's really quite simple

2007-03-19T23:34:00-05:00

At first glance, the topic can seem somewhat overwhelming. The key, however, is to understand each of them separately and then using them together won't seem overwhelming in the least. I'll touch briefly on each of them independently, but will assume for the bulk of this post that you have at least an elementary understanding of what each is and generally how they work.

Ajax refers

Client-Side Interactivity without Ajax

2006-09-18T19:49:00-05:00

Keeping response times down and interactivity high has and always will be two important priorities with web interfaces of any kind. For standard html interfaces, Ajax is all the buzz and is great when it’s necessary to maintain interaction with live data. But when a static version of the data will do just fine, there’s at least one other alternative that you may want to consider….

Cool Eclipse Plugin for CSS and JS

2006-08-24T12:28:00-05:00

Aptana is an Eclipse plugin that came to me highly recommended by a peer (Doug Sims) and has proven itself to be a real assett to me as well. What does it do? Only provide code assist with both Javascript and CSS files! Another VERY COOL thing it does within the code assist is provide visual indicators of which CSS and Javascript attributes are

Don't you hate it when...

2006-05-11T01:04:00-05:00

Okay, here's the scene:

You're standing in a crowded 4 star hotel lobby, leaning against the 10 ft fountain in the center. In your hand you are holding a javascript array with 5 items in it, the last of which has a null value. So you ask the little Firefox guy on your left shoulder to tell you how many items are in your array. He looks it over, sees that the last item has a null value, and so tells you that your array has 4 items in it

Doug Boude (rhymes with 'loud')

Leveraging Response Headers in Ajax Calls