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Working with AJAX and forms
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Loading ...Recently I’ve been involved with rebuilding a login and registration section on a website. As it currently is both are separate pages that will be loaded when you hit the links. What the bosses liked to see is that the user is not taken away from the content when they have to log in.
The only way to do that is in an AJAX popup. This would then show the registration / login box. Not to fancy you would say, well so did I originally. But the real problem began when forms where on the page loading the login popup. Because I have to reload after submitting the login I lost all information in the form.
The reason for the refresh is adding user specific content. But loosing the information of the form was not the point.
The quick hack
To solve this I had to do some dirty hacking. (Really dirty :)) When I perform the login I get back the url where I am supposed to go to. If this is on the same project instead of redirecting I will start building a new form to the url. In this form I copy all elements of the existing form. After this is all done its as simple as calling the javascript form.submit(). Et voila!
In pseudo code it looks something like:
doAjaxLogin();
checkRedirectUrl();
buildRedirectForm();
The beauty of this way is that the user doesn’t even get a warning that they are submitting a form. Which is kinda strange to me, but hay if it works!
Netbeans 5.5 And Problems with Vista
You might have noticed by my previous posts that I’m dry running some applications under Windows Vista. Well I found out a couple of days ago that Netbeans is one of those programs that just won’t work right. It will compile and run. But you can’t edit to much text.
I’ll try and explain why. When you start up Netbeans everything looks great. Wahoo!!
But as soon as you start working you’ll start scrolling through the code or the files. And this is were the problem starts. As soon as you start scrolling all the text becomes blurred. Even worse unreadable. It could be that this is because of Java, but I doubt it.
This is the one program that prevents me from moving to Vista completely. As I need it at work to develop. I do hope they fix it in version 6.
Dual boot Vista and XP Easy?
I’ve been doing some reading about the problems people are having with installing Windows Vista. One that keeps rearing its ugly head is the dual boot capability with Windows XP. Don’t get me wrong most of the times it will work, but sometimes it doesn’t. I had the same problem.
I installed Vista on a seperate drive from Windows XP and thought that this would be dual boot. Silly me! As soon as I got Vista installed I could no longer boot Windows XP. It kept saying something about the kernal.dll not being found on the OS.
After some research it turns out that this happens when the Vista bootloader is trying to boot up Windows XP (or any other pre Vista OS) as windows Vista. Is it me or does that sound completely wrong. Knowing what the problem is I started looking for an idiot proof way to solve it. (Me being the idiot :))
As it turns out there is an easy utility to change the boot settings of the Vista bootloader. The program is called WindowsBootPro. First I advice you to back up the existing settings, just in case :(. Do this by hitting the backup/restore button and selecting save.
Then its time to set Windows XP to a pre Vista OS. This will make sure it boots again. Do this following these simple steps:
- Hit manage OS, this will show you the bootable os versions available
- Either create a new one by hitting Add new operating system entry.
- Make sure to select Windows legacy and not the Windows Vista radio button
- Give the boot os a name you like. Probably ‘Windows XP’
- Select the drive letter that you installed the OS on, this doesn’t have to be C:
- Hit apply to effect the changes
Now you’re ready to boot Windows XP again. So have fun! Play a little.
Until next time…
Symbolic Links Under Vista
I am a fan of symbolic links. For those that don’t know what that is. It basically means you have all your files in for example ‘D:\Settings’ and you have another folder ‘C:\Proj\Sett’ pointing to the first location. Seems confusing, well it is. But it’s also very useful!
For as far as I know Vista is the first version in Windows that includes a tool to do this. Even though it’s been implemented for a while, you always had to download third party tools. So what’s the tools name, well mklink.
You can use it for directories. Which is damn useful if you have config files that need to be used in multiple places (like I usually do :)). Do this with:
mklink /D destination source
Once you’ve used it you’l love it. Just be careful as it can become a hell to figure out what’s pointing where if you don’t have a good system.
Asus doesn’t Like Vista
I tried to install Windows Vista yesterday. Was about time, since I’m a developer and we now need to test on this OS as well! No biggy you’d think. Wrong!!!!!
Apperantly Asus choose to not support Vista just yet. Well all notebooks have the label ‘Vista capable’, but most aren’t. More accurately spoken the hardware is just the BIOS aint. Let me tell you what happens if you try and install Vista on a new laptop. You insert the Vista CD. Laptop starts up. It sees the CD and decides lets boot again. And it keeps on doing so!
Now I haven’t a clue on what is actually going on with it, but according to this guy it’s got something to do with the BitLocker technology. As it turns out windows is making a call to the BIOS to check if BitLocker is supported or not. And as genius as the people are at Asus they decided that if this call is made the laptop shall reboot. Smart aint it!
There is a way around it though, you could wait for a BIOS update of Asus. Which in my case wasn’t needed as Asus released version 306 in january this year, fixing this. But I’ve heard there are still models out there without a fix. (Guess that’s the advantage of having a high end bussiness model :)). So what do you need to do (again I didn’t figure this out, but have translated it to english:
- Before continuing make a bootable disk with BartPE and put the following files on there:
- Bootloader image
- WinImage, for overwriting the MBR (master boot record)
- Since you can’t install Vista from the CD you’ll first need to install another version of windows. After this is done you can install Vista from that version of windows.
- At some point during the installation Vista will reboot your computer. At this point you’re screwed :), not really but you’ll need to do the following:
- Put your bootable disk in to boot from BartPE
- Start WinImage and select ‘Disk’ selecting the ‘Edit Master boot record properties’
- Select the checkbox ‘Include non-removable hard disks’, otherwise your HDD might not be visible
- Press ‘Import’ and select the bootloader image you’ve downloaded
- Reboot and the installation will continue
- After some time Vista will again reboot and you’ll be screwed again in the loop. At this point repeat the steps described in point 3.
- Complete the installation and voila a working copy of Windows Vista.
Please note that if you experience any problems you’ll need to perform some additional steps One problem is no longer being able to boot Windows XP, at least I couldn’t. Until an official BIOS update is available you won’t be able to fix that. I’ll explain how to fix that problem in a later post.
Edit: added some links to more information on BitLocker
