filePro with AJAX - Article and Video

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Only Howie would say something like:
> 
> Thanks Mark, that hit the spot right on.

Thanks back.  :)  Glad it was useful!

> To paraphrase Heinlein: "When it's time to railroad - you build railroads." 
> Meaning that when everything is in place for a technology to work then it's 
> time to use it.

Well...sometimes.  :)  I stopped being an early adopter when they started
spitting out a new acronym and/or tool about once every week and a half.  I
like to see how things pan out a bit before jumping on something.

> One question - above you talked about "fuzzy look-ahead" are you really 
> doing a fuzzy search that or just doing a partial match search?

It's a partial match at beginning of string.  I've never used fP's fuzzy
search--ever.

> Choosing a name from the list for Pickup Name or Consignee Name will fill in 
> the rest of the data and "lock" those fields.

Sweet.

> Currently, once all the required fields are filled in, the Save button just 
> calls a script to show the environment the server / cgi program would get so 
> feel free to experiment.
> 
> Any feed back would be appreciated.

1)  MY EYES!!!  I thought it was small when I first brought it up.  I run
it at 1024x768 fullscreen in FireFox.  I also can't fit the entire sidebar
dynamic content onscreen without scrolling, which is an issue.  My font is
jacked up by two notches by default so I can even -read- it on a 17" LCD without
squinting.  If I crank it down two notches, it fits the 1024x768, but I can
just -barely- make that stuff out, even squinting.

2) Things like Customer...  You can get a partial list, which is cool.  You
select the appropriate record, it's filled in.  But your cursor focus goes
entirely away.  You should probably drop the cursor in the next intended
field in the normal flow of things right after filling in the value for
that field.  Extrapolate to all fields, since you're doing a lot of fields
here.

3) You might think about taking a slightly different approach to your
multiple selection.  It might save you considerable screen real estate and
help address point 1 if you adopted an autocomplete that worked like the
one at www.capxous.com.  You'd have it dropping over the top of your form
right under the field and be able to arrow about and select entirely with
the keyboard.  You'd be saving screen real estate.  Try the Wikipedia demo
on that site and take a look at it.  Note that he also drops you back in
the same field.  It's not really a matter of -where- the cursor drops you
(current field versus next field...in fact, I'd opt for current so that
reverse tab navigation isn't hosed), but a matter of -doing- a cursor
placement afterwards so you don't have to waste valuable time and motion
re-focusing your cursor.

4) Bit concerned about the security.  I looked over the JS and see you
shipping a qualifier back.  If that qualifier is ever used in a command
line, even if it's inside tag.bat or whatever you have, you're opening
yourself to arbitrary code execution at worst, denial of service at best,
unless you make sure you sanitise any qualifiers coming in.  I would make
sure on the server side (you may have already but I'll cover it just in
case) that you only use qualifiers that exist and that have no spurious
characters like ";" or "|" in them.  Of the two, pipe is actually the most
dangerous, as it will let one do arbitrary code execution on Windows, where
semi-colon only works on *nix.  That's the problem fpcgi 1.0 is subject to.
Unless you're sanitising it and/or making sure it's only one of a set you
specify can be used, you're opening yourself up to attack if you let that
value (or any value, but this one looks like it would be most likely to be)
near a command line.

5) Not a big fan of alert boxes, myself.  I think they're okay for
debugging purposes, but I've always felt they make things feel unpolished
when they come up in a finished application.  It's a little jarring, kind
of like taking you out of the moment by doing something odd in prose.  I
really prefer to work such information into a place on the page proper.  I
recognise this as a matter of personal preference, however.

Overall, cool!  :)

As far as looking at what's at Capxous, well...View Source won't help you a
lot, but FireFox with FireBug installed will.  :) :) :)  It amazes me that
one would even bother trying to put copyright notice tags in there that can
be removed once you license when you can access the entire source with
FireBug.  That's just amazingly dumb on his part.  I'm not advocating
ripping his code, but you can easily see how he does it.

For debugging AJAX, FireBug is a must, as far as I'm concerned.  I can't
live without it.  IE:  "Error on page," can't do a thing to find out what
or where.  Could we be more cryptic, please?  FireBug: "N errors," hit F12
and look at the console, click on the appropriate error and be taken right
to the fault point in the scripting.  Do the man-hour calculation, folks.
:) Not to mention full access to CSS, HTML, etc.  I love the way you can
trace the HTML layout by mousing over the HTML tags in th trace window and
the right areas highlight in the browser window proper.  It's just a killer
plugin that no web developer should be without, pro or hobbyist.

I also see you use innerHTML.  So do I, honestly.  But realise that this is
only good in a certain percentage of browsers since they de-standardised
it.  It works in IE 6 and 7, FireFox 1.5 and 2.0, and the latest Opera.
Rumour has it that it doesn't work in Safari.  Personally, I don't -care-
about Safari, as it's mostly a Mac thing, and their Windows release has had
nothing but bugs and security problems since they released it--oh, and it
requires XP or higher so I can't even use it on Win2K.  As long as you're
comfortable with the fact it's not 100% cross-browser, more power to ya.  I
personally think it's a lot better than arduous DOM manipulation, myself,
if one is comfortable with the limitations of not being 100% standardised.

mark->
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