Tag: AJAX

Posted on

Not Just Another Tridion GUI Extension

For the past few weeks I’ve been working (whenever I could find the time) on a GUI extension for the new 2011 Tridion platform.

Unlike previous extensions I’ve built, this one is much more complex and spans over more functionality than the more specific ones I worked on before.

I call it the “List Quick Helper“. Where the main idea was to create a useful tool to supplement the information exposed by the GUI’s list view. The theme of this extension is to boost productivity by exposing data quickly and providing small tools to get common tasks done faster.

If you’ve worked with the Content Manager Explorer you’re familiar with having to open an item to view its properties, say to tell the schema of a component you have to open the component’s editing form or to know the file name of page, again need to open the edit form. Even on a fast system it takes at least a few seconds to load up the form. For a shared item you need to select one of the options in the modal dialog (open parent, localize or read-only). After several clicks and at least a few seconds (if not more) you finally can find that little piece of information you were seeking.

What if that information was exposed in the list view immediately? Well, now it can be:

Tridion GUI List Quick Helper View

Continue reading “Not Just Another Tridion GUI Extension”

Posted on

My First Attempt at Tridion 2011 GUI Extensions

About a month ago I happily shared a GUI extension I’ve built for Tridion 2009 called the Item XML Display extension.
This extension lets a user (typically a developer) view the entire XML structure of a Tridion item from within the GUI without the need to open a new IE window or having a remote session to the CM server.

If you’re one of those already using this extension and have been dreading the moment Tridion 2011 will come out and you will be left without being able to quickly view items’ XML, fear not! I got you covered:

xmldisplay-extension-2011-firefox
Continue reading “My First Attempt at Tridion 2011 GUI Extensions”

Posted on

Integrating Tridion with Gravatar

Lately I’ve worked on a Gravatar library for .NET which I released in July. I have also recently had the chance to work on Tridion GUI extensions for a customer.

This got me thinking; wouldn’t it be cool to integrate the two? Almost immediately I thought; yes, it will be cool!

So I’ve set to work on a nice GUI extension that will bring Gravatar to Tridion users and give the GUI a bit of a social touch make it feel more personalized by displaying a personalized photo for each user.

And so the integration is really 3 different extensions that can be each used individually or together.

Current User Photo

The first integration shows the Gravatar photo for the current user logged on to the Content Manager Explorer:

Continue reading “Integrating Tridion with Gravatar”

Posted on

Creating a Gravatar client with jQuery and WCF

Introduction

A couple of weeks ago I announced the release of the first .NET implementation of the Gravatar API.

Gravatar.NET is available for download on Codeplex.

What I’d like to show in this article is how to make use of the library using jQuery and WCF to create your own Gravatar client (Ponderi.com style).

This article will demonstrate how to show a user their Gravatar account images, allow the user to activate a different image or delete it.

I will build upon many of the concepts I described in an earlier article I wrote called: “Creating a Webservice Proxy with jQuery”. So if you like, check it out first as I won’t go into the basics in this article.

Continue reading “Creating a Gravatar client with jQuery and WCF”

Posted on

Announcing Gravatar.NET

Introduction

For a while now I’ve been working on an implementation of the Gravatar public API.

Unfortunately it took longer than I had intended, what with those pesky work commitments and personal life issues…

I’m glad to tell you that Gravatar.NET is now available for download on Codeplex.

If you don’t know what Gravatar is, it’s: “A Globally Recognized Avatar”, allowing you to store a personal image (or images) and reuse it across different websites that support the use of it (example: WordPress.com).

If you’re building a website that includes storing user account information, and let’s face it, what website doesn’t do that these days, then typically one of the things your users expect is to be able to associate a photo to recognize their account on the site. Instead of having to store and manage these photos on your server (sometimes with a bandwidth/storage limit), Gravatar can do it for you.

Continue reading “Announcing Gravatar.NET”

Posted on

IE Caching Ajax Results – How to fix

Updated (25/06/2010): Fixed typos in code example
Updated (16/11/2012): Fixed missing comma. 

I have been working on a website recently and one of the pages on the site has a  main functionality of showing dynamic results returned from a AJAX
call to a WCF service.

As I was developing and continuously testing with Firefox I was happy to see that my code was working well; based on the URL the results on the page will differ as expected.
However, When it came to test the page with Internet Explorer the results were dramatically different… No matter what the URL was the same content from my initial request kept appearing on the screen! Quickly enough I realized that it wasn’t something wrong with my code but with IE, after all in Firefox and Chrome it was working just fine.

So naturally, I googled for a solution and found this StackOverflow thread that confirmed to me that this was indeed an issue with IE. Unfortunately, the good answers there were only helpful to those who use jQuery to initiate the AJAX requests but I was using the proxy generated automatically by ASP.NET, so I had to find my own solution as I was unable to find anything useful online.

Below are ways you can use to fix the problem. First, I’ll show how to fix it when using the MS Service Proxy and then how to fix it when using jQuery.

Continue reading “IE Caching Ajax Results – How to fix”