January 6, 2009
NETTUTS has a series of videos that show you how to get started with jQuery. Good stuff.
September 29, 2008
Totally rockin announcement today: Microsoft will be shipping jQuery with Visual Studio. If you follow the Dovetail Developers, you already know that we're big fans of jQuery at Dovetail. ScottGu has details on his blog about this announcement, as does John Resig. Scott Hanselman also has a good write-up. From ScottGu's post: We will distribute the jQuery JavaScript library as-is, and will not be forking or changing the source from the main jQuery branch. The files will continue to use and ship under the existing jQuery MIT license. We will also distribute intellisense-annotated versions that provide great Visual Studio intellisense and help-integration at design-time. The jQuery intellisense annotation support will be available as a free web-download in a few weeks. We will also extend Microsoft product support to jQuery beginning later this year, which will enable developers and enterprises to…
As I mentioned in a previous post, I've started using Dovetail Mobile Agent for my day-to-day case activities. Its still early in its project lifecycle, so it doesn't have all of the bells and whistles (yet), but that's OK with me. For example, you can Log an Email, but it doesn't have the capability to automatically populate a signature within the email. Since this is something that I wanted now, here's how to make that happen, without modifying the application itself. Ubiquity In a previous post, I detailed my first Ubiquity command for working with Dovetail Mobile Agent. Now, we'll add a new command for inserting my signature. The Ubiquity code: CmdUtils.CreateCommand({ name: "signature", icon: "
September 8, 2008
I was pretty excited to play with Ubiquity, a new Firefox extension that lets me think and act in a more natural language with my PC. From the Ubiquity Tutorial: Ubiquity is an experimental Firefox extension that gives you a powerful new way to interact with the Web. You're used to telling Firefox where you want to go by typing Web addresses into the URL bar. With Ubiquity installed, you'll be able to tell Firefox what you want it to do by typing commands into a new Ubiquity input box. The commands that come with Ubiquity are just the beginning: anyone can create new commands and share them. Some of the built-in commands include: add-to-calendar calculate define ebay-search email flickr google map search tinyurl weather zoom After playing with the build-in commands, I was ready to try and write my…
August 26, 2008
As part of the continuous effort to enhance and improve our applications, a new Spell Check feature was added for the next release of Dovetail Agent. This feature was added for every text area input in the pages of Agent. Currently there are almost 100 different pages in Dovetail Agent that use text area controls. Adding the new functionality to every page individually would be one way of implementing the change, but certainly not the most efficient. Instead, the new functionality is added dynamically to each page as it is opened in the browser. This approach makes a lot of sense. Since the code that adds the link under each text area is contained in one file, any future modifications will be very easy as well. The Spell Check feature is made available to the user by adding a Check…
July 11, 2008
I came across this code today, and it took me a second to figure out what it was doing: strSortOrder = document.getElementById("ad").options[document.getElementById("ad").selectedIndex].value; To break it down, it locates a Select control on the page (FindElementById), finds the element again and gets its selected value's index (selectedIndex), and sets the variable to the value of the option at the specified index (options[index].value). There is a jQuery plugin that really simplifies this process. Using jquery.selectboxes.js, the code now is as simple as this: strSortOrder = $("#ad").selectedValues(); This code now does the same thing, but it is also easy to read, and understand. It shortened from 86 characters to 26, and now requires no explanation. There are many different cases where jQuery can simplify the code.
July 1, 2008
Dovetail Software, Inc. recently recently received a request from one of our customers to make Queue Membership Management easier and more efficient to use. The screen image to the left shows the Manage Queues form in Dovetail Admin, Version 2.5. When a queue is selected at the top of the form, its current members and supervisors are displayed at the bottom right of the Membership tab. Adding or changing members and supervisors was done one by one, and with only the login name for each user to determine the identity of each user. The login names are unique, but it can be hard to tell users apart based on login name alone. The new requested functionality to make queue management easier includes adding the first and last name for each user, and allowing multiple users to be added or removed…
The first step in making the changes was to add the first and last names to each of the membership grids. This simply required changing the data source for the user information from the user table to the empl_user view in both of the user grid pages. The grid_queue_mem.asp and grid_queue_mem2.asp pages each retrieve a list of records from the database, and build a table of user information from the results. Adding multi-select capability required much more change, so it was time to look for a better way to get the job done. This is where jQuery enters the picture. There is an excellent jQuery plugin available for grids, called jqGrid. There is a lot of capability available, and it allows us to simplify the code. In the previous version of the form shown above, there is an…
June 24, 2008
John Resig (creator of jQuery) recently posted a bunch of his presentations online, focused on JavaScript and jQuery. Check 'em out. I'm fast becoming a huge fan of jQuery, and we're now using it a lot more within Dovetail Agent. Not only is the library itself cool - but the plethora of available plugins really make it rock.
