Thoughts of Dharmil

Final Reflection – WISE

admin — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 18:19:59 +0000

A. If I could go back, knowing what I know I would picked up ASP.NET earlier. That would really have helped in the project – and help us deliver the project faster. But learning ASP.NET was a learning curve – and it helped a lot specially in the lastD. few weeks.

B. I brought my existing knowledge of Database design, MySQL, jQuery and HTML/CSS into the team. I think I did a good job at all them – after seeing the end result. I was also kind of a tutor for Harsha another teammate, I helped him to get upto speed with HTML/CSS.

C. I learnt lot of new skills after coming to EPICS – specially in the ASP.NET framework from Jason and John and how to interact with the database using C#. I also learnt how to use the jQuery Validation Framework in ASP.NET after coming to Epics.

D. I think the new skills that I learnt will help me in the professional world. Knowing ASP.NET is a good thing for developing Enterprise based solutions – and jQuery Validation is the defacto validation in lot of the websites – which will help me out.

E. The biggest ethical issue we faced – that we could have delivered a substandard product without any kind of validation – which would crash the software/result into hacking etc.

To fix the issue – we went to CFRC many times – asked them for bugs and fixed them accordingly. We escaped every query to prevent SQL injections and we did both client and server side validation.

If we wouldn’t have resolved this issue – CFRC would have gotten a bad product and a team next semester would have to continue what we’re doing right now. Instead we fixed the issue – so that CFRC would be happy with the product.

Week 15

admin — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 22:56:40 +0000

On Tuesday me, Harsha, Pratik, Srivardhan and John met up again because we needed to do some bug fixes before we could deliver the project.

I updated the Admin/Events/default.aspx page which didn’t have link to delete the event/job. Also it wouldn’t refresh after it deleted something – so I added the refresh code.

Next I updated createJob.aspx page – which would crash if you entered some bad data – I added javascript based validation as well as C# validation.

Next John figured out why users wouldn’t show up for the Admin/Events/default.aspx – but he couldn’t show them correctly – so I fixed the UI for that.

We also added a thankyou.aspx page where the user gets redirected when he successfully signs up – and I made some changes in Site.Master

We made lot of bug fixes – now the main thing remaining was the navigation – which me and John tried but get it working right.

We got lot of stuff done today as well – and we were all confident we would be able to deliver the project.

Week 14

admin — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 22:35:47 +0000

Me, Harsha, Pratik and Srivardhan met once and decided on what things we need to get done because we were getting close to the deadline.

Pratik told me that the website doesn’t work right on IE6. Apparently IE doesn’t support inline-block property so I had to resort to using inline property for the events.

Also fixed a small bug to replace – from the phone numbers otherwise the program would crash.

On December 1 – Me, Harsha, Pratik, Srivardhan and John met to get lot of things done. I updated the expand/collapse images – also made the whole event “bars” clickable – which took some 1 – 2 hours.

I also added – some more links on the SiteMaster so we wouldn’t have to type out the URL everytime.

Then Pratik took the responsibility of assigning jobs and Me, Harsha, Srivardhan started working on addjobs from scratch – because it was a team effort we got the work done quicker.

We then added link on the admin/events/default.aspx page to add jobs – and tested it which worked fine.

We then figured out the code for logout.aspx – which was necessary because we needed to switch between users and we couldn’t do that easily without using two different browsers.

Later, we split up and Harsha and Srivardhan were working on something else – and me on Pratik worked on edit events. We had the problem where after clicking on submit it wouldn’t update the data and the problem was we did not use the if(!ispostback) which me and John figured out after googling.

Later I worked on cleaning the UI for Volunteer/account.aspx (which looked horrible before) and added a page called addFamilyMember.aspx which adds the family members.

Later I had to update the UI for Events/default.aspx which showed the jobs – and which users signed up for what jobs (which wouldn’t show up).

We worked straight from 10 PM – 6 AM this time – and got lot of things working. And after this team meeting our morale boosted and we were sure we would be able to delete this project. I feel that this was the best team meeting session so far in Epics where we really got together and worked on tons of stuff.

Week 13

admin — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 22:23:19 +0000

This was the thanksgiving break and me, Harsha, Pratik and Srivardhan met up to get some work done.

We worked on the default.aspx – and it was a challenge because we had to bind the data correctly and show it correctly on the default.aspx page. The functionality was a copy from Volunteer/default.aspx

We also tested lot of pages – and made changes to the javascript.

We also updated forgotpassword.aspx to send the email.

We accomplished lot of things together on thanksgiving and it was nice that we all met.

Later, Daniel made a commit which made changes to the javascript but somehow caused a conflict – when we all updated. I made the necessary change and made another commit to resolve the conflicts.

I also felt that lot of things were left – and we woudn’t be able to deliver the project. We also got Jason to do the role based authorization because that was preventing us from making lot of changes.

Week 12

admin — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 23:05:29 +0000

Today I added jQuery based validation in signup.aspx – which contained lot of code and it was challenge to get it all working together. But the best part was how clean the code looked – and how easy it would be to code other validation pages based on this one.

Daniel figured out a neat trick: If you want one or the other field to be required, you can do it like this:

[javascript]<%= txtHomePhone.UniqueID %>: {
required: “#<%= txtCellPhone.ClientID %>:blank”,
},
<%= txtCellPhone.UniqueID %>: {
required: “#<%= txtHomePhone.ClientID %>:blank”,
}[/javascript] :blank is important here. I also added some custom validation methods such as phoneUS, zipUS etc.

On Friday me and Daniel discussed about the expand/collapse ability of the events. We discussed about using tables/divs and we figured out divs would be a better option. Also we also figured out it would be better if I work on figuring out the expand/collapse in jquery because I had something similar earlier.

On Sunday, I worked on Volunteer/default.aspx – [javascript]$(document).ready(function () {
$(“.expand”).click(function (e) {
e.preventDefault(); //Make sure we don’t get redirected….
var pointer = $(this).parent().parent().next(); //pointer to the relevant jobsList

if ($(pointer).hasClass(“hidden”)) //We are hidden… show
{
$(pointer).removeClass(“hidden”);
$(pointer).fadeIn(“slow”);
}
else
{
$(pointer).addClass(“hidden”);
$(pointer).fadeOut(“slow”);
}
});

$(“#expandAll”).click(function (e) {
$(“.jobsList”).fadeIn(“slow”);
});

$(“#collapseAll”).click(function (e) {
$(“.jobsList”).fadeOut(“slow”);
});
});[/javascript]

[html]

<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container, "DataItem.Name") %>
<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container, "DataItem.Location") %>
<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container, "DataItem.StartdateTime") %>
<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container, "DataItem.EnddateTime") %>

<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container, "DataItem.Name") %>
<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container, "DataItem.StartdateTime") %>
<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container, "DataItem.EnddateTime") %>
<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container, "DataItem.Maxpeople") %>
<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container, "DataItem.Description") %>

[/html] Figuring out the jQuery took me about 4 – 5 hours. I still felt that we weren’t doing enough work to be able to deliver the project.

Team Meeting – Week 10 & 11

admin — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 21:29:00 +0000

Today I was working on continuing the work on the jQuery validation plugin – finding different methods and creating custom ones.

One of the major problems I had was getting the equalTo method working. Normally if you have
[html]
[/html]

your equalTo method would work like
[javascript] pass: {
required: true,
minlength: 5
},
confirm_password: {
required: true,
minlength: 5,
equalTo: “#pass1″
}[/javascript] (Note the difference between pass (which is the name) and pass1 (which is the id).

Now the challenge was to getting this working with the ASP.NET ID, which I had to find how is it generated. Apparently the ID is <%= txtPassword.ClientID %> (which for reasons unknown to me sounds very similar to <%= txtPassword.UniqueID %> So for example you would use it like:

[html]
Password Confirm password

[/html]

[javascript]$(“form”).validate({
<%= txtPassword.UniqueID %>: {
minlength: 2,
required: true
},
<%= txtPasswordConfirm.UniqueID %>: {
equalTo: “#<%= txtPassword.ClientID %>”
}
});[/javascript] Note where we use UniqueID and where we use ClientID. I feel that was a good learning exercise. Also one of the main problems was that Visual Studio would underline certain statements in red as if it had error – and it really didn’t.

Next I was trying to figure out how to use addMethod and return two different messages. And with the way updates are going we won’t be able to deliver the project.

During the week 11 – I was continuing researching the addMethod usage – and I had very less luck – so I decided to scrape that for now. I made improvements to the way error messages were shown – and some UI changes.

I was very skeptical about we delivering the project – because day by day less and less work was getting done.

Week 9 – Lab and Team Meeting

admin — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 21:20:05 +0000

In the lab meeting, we discussed the different issues that the design reviewers were talking about – and how to tackle them.

I was looking at the validation that Daniel did in different pages. What he accomplished in a short while was really amazing, he used Jason’s validation.js code which had different validation methods like checkRange etc.

But what I noticed was, his code was not aesthetically pleasing. It would look like

[javascript] if (!LengthValidation(startTimeHour, 1, 2)) {
showMessage(‘Start time hour must be of length 1 or 2′);
} else if (!NumberBetween(startTimeHour, 1, 12)) {
showMessage(‘Start time hour cannot be less than 1 or greater than 12′);[/javascript]

It did the work, but after a lot of ifs, it gets very confusing what is done where. Also his code, it would just show one message at a time, so if you had multiple errors, you would not know about them unless you click on submit multiple times.

So I spent the rest of the lab researching on other jQuery based validation options. The most relevant one for us (and also being the most popular one) was called the jQuery Validation Plugin.

Next day in the team meeting, I worked on getting the code working with ASP.NET

There were couple of issues like: I had put the javascript files in wrong order for example:
[html]
[/html]

The problem with the above markup is that jquery validation requires jQuery and by putting jquery.js after jquery.validation.js the browser did not know what it was talking about! That took a while to figure out – because it looks very obvious but you can’t immediately figure out.

Later I had to figure out how to use selector tags with based items because they had a different name and id.
Normally if you would have something like
[html]
[/html] you would use the jquery selector plugin like
[javascript]