FieldTech Application

Moving to WordPress

2012-01-31T14:04:00.003+13:00

I've decided to move my blog to WordPress.

There is a couple of reasons for this. The first is that I don't seem to have that much control over Blogger. It's just a pretty limiting system. Second its tying into Google Plus isn't a bad thing but it does seem a bit stupid. For example creating an about page so readers can see what this blog is all about goes to a Google Pages site which doesn't get a link back to the page from the blog page. This seems ridiculous to me because a lot of readers won't know the page exists. What's the point?

Wordpress also has an iPad application whereas Blogger does not. This means I can edit wherever I am without my laptop. Blogger has an iPhone/iPod Touch version but not an iPad version. I prefer to update posts on an iPad than an iPhone.

The Wordpress site is here:

http://fieldtechapplication.wordpress.com/

Cool commands

2012-01-27T08:37:00.000+13:00

This post is a bit stupid really but I feel that the simple things are always the best things. That's the whole point of this application in that I want to make call systems simple.

I'm finding a lot of use for a couple of very simple commands which are making things so much easier.

The first little fella is:

if (!...) {}

This blog isn't really aimed at the experienced programmers it's aimed at the beginners so the experienced are probably laughing at this post right now but I don't care.

This little piece of code is proving to be quite handy for my site at the moment. I've used it like this:

if (!$DB_Connect) {
echo '<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" Content="0; URL=includes/create_database.php">';
}

So $DB_Connect has been defined simply as a mysql_connect statement in order to look for a dedicated user for my call centre application. If it can't connect to that database using that user then it will redirect to a page that creates the database (the script is assuming that if the user doesn't exist then neither does the database) and after the database is created the required user is created and given full permissions over the database.

Seeing as the database is now created obviously new tables need to be created and thus the user is redirected to a page that sets that up for them.

The second command I'm using a lot is:

switch() {}

I use it like this:

switch ("$userlevel") {
case 0:
include("menus/customer.php");
break;
case 1:
include("menus/engineer.php");
break;
}

And so on.

This allows me to perform various actions based on whatever the user level is set to. These details are stored in the users table in the MySQL database. There are five levels being customer, engineer, helpdesk, management, and admin.

By using case I can call in menus specific to those users with the least amount of code.

One command I use probably the most is:

include("...");

The reason I use it so much is because it allows me to have specific files for the task. Instead of having one massive file with everything I need I have split each individual task into individual files. Some might frown on this but I'm beginning and so I need to know where things are breaking. Sure the error messages tend to point you to the right place but sometimes you only get a blank page. As I make a change and then include that file into the main page it gives me a better idea where it is broken so that I can fix it. It means I only need to check a small file instead of a massive file.

Speed wise it may have its drawbacks but I can come back to that later I guess.

So those are the things I'm making good use of at the moment. I want my code to be clean and readable and next person friendly so I'll probably look at that in my next post.

Nope, back to MySQL

2012-01-26T11:16:00.000+13:00

The reason for looking into PostgresSQL as I mentioned was that it is included in Mac OS X Lion Server. MySQL was dropped in Lion Server but I've decided that the tools for PostgresSQL suck and it isn't warranted in spending more time learning it. MySQL it is.

Look, PostgresSQL is probably a brilliant database system but it doesn't really seem to have the support it deserves.

For every 1 PostgresSQL tutorial you'll find 20 MySQL and 10 of those will be awesome as opposed to the 1 PostgresSQL tutorial which will be mediocre at best.

Compared to MySQL Workbench that is made by Oracle PGAdmin sucks and seems to be a big bag of hurt.

The experiment failed so it's time to go back to something I know works really well. Sure it means installing a separate app but I know it works and works well and that I can get the support. I just can't say the same for PostgreSQL.

PostgreSQL

2012-01-25T09:19:00.002+13:00

I'm rewriting the application for use with the PostgreSQL database instead of MySQL.

The reason for this is that my ultimate goal is to have my own Mac OS X Lion Server (most likely a Mac Mini Server) setup so that clients can access remotely and all that.

This raised the issue of MySQL being dropped in Lion Server in favour of PostgreSQL. Yes I could download MySQL for Mac OS X and it will work very well but why run two database systems and chew through resources when one will work just as well?

From what I can see there isn't really a lot of difference between the two systems when using PHP and what differences there are seem to be very minor. I guess that's the great thing when everyone bases their command set against a stalwart standard like SQL (you listening Microsoft?). Therefore I don't see any reason why it's going to take any longer to learn PostgreSQL over MySQL.

Folders working... more or less

2012-01-23T16:44:00.000+13:00

Ok so I've found a script that allows me to do what I need. There is a caveat though. While recursive I can't seem to get the script to create the links properly. This means I can go root then a sub folder then a file but I can't do recursive folders to create the link.

There must be some way to do this but I can't work out how so what I've got I'll use for the time being. I don't really want to spend too much time on this at the moment as it is working and I've got more important aspects to look into.

Security is one thing now. I need to block stuff off according to user level.

Working with folders

2012-01-22T22:41:00.000+13:00

My current project is looking at doing folder scans so as to create a documentation section for the engineers so they can access the documents when out in the field.

The goal is to do a recursive directory scan in order to have sub folders for easy layout.

I can do a single scan but I need to workout the recursive stuff.

After that I need to workout how to have permissions based on user level to each folder. I've seen a bit about .htaccess so I'm picking this needs to be setup at some stage as well unless there is a better method.

Could do with some help here if anyone is reading this.

What is W3C thinking?

2012-01-17T12:48:00.000+13:00

I love CSS. I think it is a massive step from setting options like <table align="center"> etc but it is also the most retarded implementation of anything I've seen since Windows 3.0 (I never saw 1 or 2).

Take for example an issue pretty much any web developer/designer has... equal height columns. Now I did outline a fix I found here: CSS is a bit of a pain. But this sort of thing should be easy with CSS because it should be a CSS thing not a Javascript thing.

Here's the mental thing. You can use:

width: 100%;

But you can't use:

height: 100%;

Now I know that this is largely a mapping to window size which creates a problem with height due to the fact that the more text and images the more you go off the screen hence height: 100%; isn't really going to work as intended but it should be something that is at least resizable to 100% according to the content. At very least make height: auto; work properly. This way if both boxes are set to height: auto; then when one grows in size both grow to the same size.

This would save a lot of heartache and a lot of unnecessary code to fix the problem. Of course this would also need to be actioned by the browser makers as well but it seems to me that it would be a relatively trivial implementation for them. I'm more than likely wrong on that though.

Then there is padding. This one irritates me more than the equal heights thing because it is a pain to work out what is going one when designing layouts.

For example, I use % for my widths to cater for those users with differing screen sizes. The problem with this when it comes to padding is not everything resizes properly. The problem with padding is I feel a perception of what padding is.

To me padding is inside a box. Take a padded room in a psych ward for instance. The size of the walls don't need to be adjusted to cater for the padding, the room just gets smaller. However this is not the case with padding in CSS. If you design a box and get its position perfect than go and add padding you mess up the layout you worked so hard to get right. The reason for this is because the way CSS is defined it essentially is putting the padding on the outside of the box not the inside. Why would you put padding on the outside? It makes no logical sense.

If you think of a website in the sense of a house layout where in the world would you ever put padding on the outside of a room? Why do you put padding in a room? To protect the person inside it don't you? How do you protect people in the room with padding if the padding is on the outside? You can't.

It's the same with padding in a box for a website. You want the padding to apply to the inside of the box because you want the text to be free from the sides for easy readability. It's a nice thought.

Take this code here:

<style>
.wrapper {
width: 60%;
border: 1px solid black;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}
.box {
padding: 5px;
border: 1px solid black;
width: 100%;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}
</style>
<div class="wrapper">
<div class="box">
<p>Hello</p>
</div>
</div>

This all seems clean and should create a box 60% of the page with a box inside that 100% of the box. Only look at the results:

Notice the right hand side? Essentially instead of a box 100% of the main box you get a box that is 100% + 5px. Why? How on God's green planet does this even begin to make sense?

Never get developers to plan UI rules. NEVER.

Lessons learned

2012-01-16T12:10:00.000+13:00

Hmmm. It seems that putting a sha1 encrypted password into a database field only 32 characters in length does not work.

Lesson learned.

I also learned another lesson... never use a variable salt such as current date because it will never work during retrieval.

Another lesson learned.

Starting from scratch

2012-01-16T11:26:00.000+13:00

OK, so after the misfortune of being forced to do a rewrite as opposed to choosing to do a rewrite I made a start today.

I decided to attack the development differently in that I've decided to use the NetTuts tutorial as the initial page and go from there.

It is working well despite a couple of hiccups. It's now a matter of adding more security to the this page. This requires a bit more research but in the meantime I can build on top of this tutorial with the skills I've picked up so far.

I have to tidy up the CSS code though. It's a little over the place but the site actually looks pretty swanky with their chosen colour scheme. :)

Oops

2012-01-12T07:28:00.000+13:00

Well my desire for a complete rewrite got a bit of a forced start yesterday.

I decided it was time to rebuild my machine because over the past few months I've built up a lot of junk along the way and I was beginning to think maybe something was causing the issues with my constants file being corrupted so I backed everything up then rebuilt. Only I hadn't actually backed up my Sites folder which includes the FieldTech application that I'm building.

So it's all back to square one now which is a good thing. I can now streamline things far better and look more at how to modularise stuff.

I'm rethinking my choice of editor as well. NetBeans is great but I'm beginning to think that it's causing some of my issues as well so I'm thinking of going back to Coda although Coda is not without its problems either however it does play nicer with the Mac system.

Here goes.

Getting the weirdest thing happening

2012-01-10T16:04:00.000+13:00

I don't know what's going on but I have a file that is referenced on every page and it keeps getting trashed.

It's kind of annoying and I'm thinking of changing things on my site to fix the problem.

As the file is required due to setting the constants for database access and other bits and pieces having this file hosed is a massive deal. Why it's happening at all is beyond me. I thought it might be something to do with having the file open in NetBeans but this isn't always the case. It's beyond me entirely.

I'm thinking of another rewrite also as my code is starting to break and get cumbersome as well. I'm looking to modularise a lot of the code as there is starting to get more and more code that is doubling up. Not sure of the best way to do this though so will have a rethink.

If anyone reading this (if anyone is reading this) please give me some tips because I'd love to know how to write the code better and more efficiently. Is separating into individual files a good idea or should I have just a few really long files? Be keen to hear your comments on this.

Refresh of plans

2012-01-07T14:03:00.000+13:00

One of the things I'm learning with all this development work is that it all changes with a single wake up call. This I love.

For example in my previous post I talked about the login page I developed for my site... well modified for my site. Well I did have a case scenario whereby if you were logged in with an account that is admin level it would redirect you to a page with admin functionality.

Today I got a clue and thought to myself why do I need to redirect to a page based on user level when I can use the case scenario to change the menu according to the logged in user? It works meaning so far I only have one page that needs to be viewed and I can tailor the page to display details according to the logged in user. Sweet.

I also changed my thinking about how I will do the menus as well. There has been a tonne of code for this small section but I figured why do I need to type so much code when I want to add a menu entry? So I hit on the idea of making the menus nothing but text files with the HTML I need to make the menu. So I went from this:

echo "<legend>Admin Tasks</legend>";
echo "<ul>";
echo "\t<li><a href=\"includes/create_user.php\">Create New User</a></li>";
echo "</ul>";

To this:

include_once 'menus/menu_admin.txt';

Mental eh?

Now all I need to do when I need to update the menu is edit the text file and not worry about code on the main page.

The only downside to all of this is there is now a lot more files. But one file for a specific function is easier to manage than a hell of a lot of code.

Login script done

2012-01-05T15:50:00.000+13:00

Wow, I have to say that was a bit of a mission but we got there.

I ended up using this script:

http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/user-membership-with-php/

But I modified it to suit my needs.

I had a couple of false starts but as I worked out what was going on I slowly modified scripts and the like in order to get things working.

I can safely say that I've proved my installation script works perfectly. :-)

I modified the script to use switch(){} with cases in order to redirect based on user level. I'm not sure if this is a good idea or best practise but it's working at the moment so I don't really care.

Editors

2012-01-05T07:50:00.000+13:00

Man trying to find a decent editor is kind of a pain. I've been using Coda on my Mac for most of my development but I'm finding now I've got more into PHP that Coda is a bit limited especially when I'm working on numerous files linked together.

Flux is a great graphical editor but its code editor is pathetic and gets in the way more than it does make things faster.

I've tried Aptana Studio but it feels wrong. I can't explain it but it seems to be more convoluted than it's good for. It seems to be a typical developer application but I'm not a typical developer.

Which brings me to the app I keep coming back to. NetBeans. NetBeans has a lot of backing behind it namely Oracle who now owns Sun. It was designed for Java development but its PHP tools are brilliant.

Adding commands is easy because it gives you the syntax for these commands and it also goes through the linked files in the document and automatically gives you names of defined contents and variables etc. For example if you created a variable called $this_is_a_variable in the file variables.php then called that variables.php folder in index.php when you start typing $this_is_a_variable it will bring up a list including this variable name to make it easier and save time typing. This is a brilliant touch.

All in all I really like NetBeans and even though it's a Java app not a Mac app it seems to work really well.

PHP Breaks easily

2012-01-05T05:30:00.000+13:00

I've spent two days trying to workout why my installation script doesn't work and been fixing problems then creating new ones.

At first it was the file wasn't being created when I used:

touch($filename);

But I seem to have worked that one out to be permissions issues which I fixed with:

chmod($filename, 0777);

Script seems to create the required file.

Then there were issues calling the created file which I'm thinking was a calling of the file before the first script that creates the file had finished executing. I'm not sure how that happened but I fixed the problem by making the call to the file the end of the creation script. It's working perfectly now.

Then I had no end of problems inserting data into the database that the script creates only to find that the reason for it was the standard "I forgot the ; at the end of my script" scenario.

I love this sort of thing though because it helps me to find the problem, workout how to fix the problem, then make it work. As I do so I am building on top of my existing knowledge.

I'm going to create a page soon that will be a list of everything in my application so you can read the code in my pages. If you are skilled in PHP please look through them and provide me with tips and techniques for getting better performance.

CSS is a bit of a pain

2011-12-24T08:05:00.000+13:00

In trying to kick this project off I decided to get the layout sorted first mostly because it's the easy part... well it would be if CSS was nice and tags that are used were actually supported.

The issue I had was getting equal heights setup and well to say the least it wasn't as easy to do as it sounds.

It would be quite easy to do if browsers supported percentages in the height tag e.g:

height: 100%;

Unfortunately they don't and so you can't get a div to fill the screen or adjust to the content size.

A Google search provided help though and sent me to this link:

The EqualHeights jQuery Plugin

Essentially using jQuery as the base it acts like a plugin in order to make creating equal height columns easier.

Unfortuntely the documentation seems to be a bit dumb so I'll explain how I got it working a lot better than what the site showed.

The first step is to download jQuery and the EqualHeights plugin and extract them to the javascript directory for your site. I like to have my stuff all nicely in separate folders so I know where everything is but it can be a pain when having to link back to these files.

I also change the name of the jQuery file which generally looks like this when downloaded:

jquery-1.7.1.min.js

I change this to simply jquery.js for scripting sake because you can upgrade without having to redo all your code.

Now comes the fun bit, calling the code. This is actually very simply and I'm going to show you the HTML5 way because it's simpler.

In the <head> tags enter the following lines:

<script src="javascript/jquery.js"></script>
<script src="javascript/jquery.equalheights.js"></script>

These two lines call the script to be used by the page. Now you have to call the function from the EqualHeights plugin like so:

<script type="text/javascript">
$(function(){ $('.box, .smallbox').equalHeights(100);});
</script>

You'll notice that in my code I have .box, .smallbox. This is where this plugin is really cool and it took me a while to work this out after having got nowhere only to get it to work but only with one class which caused all my boxes to be the same width which I did not want. It was only me playing around with the above line that I worked out you can select multiple classes which allows for multiple width columns. Simply by adding a comma between the classes in this function call will select all the classes I want to make equal height.

So now for getting our page to do something.

In the main HTML I did this:

<div class="containWidth">
<div class="container">
<div class="box">
<h1>Field Tech: Installation</h1>
</div>
<div class="smallbox">
<h2>Installation Progress</h2>
</div>
</div>
</div>

This creates the DIVs that will be modified by the script to be equal lengths.

It's actually very simple once you get the hang of it.