I am trying to modify an existing XML package of Aspdotnetstorefront Multistore. It's an internal XML package to show the variants of a certain product. What I did to start with was to copy-paste the whole code as is and throw it into a new custom XML package. The problem is that it works fine in the original package but not in the copied package. When I try to run it the function "AddtoCartForm" crashes the page and show the following error while display in red the line that contains the function call:
An HtmlHelper is required for this method. Make sure to specify one when you call the RunXmlPackage method
The format of the function is:
<xsl:value-of select="aspdnsf:AddtoCartForm(ProductID, VariantID, 1, 1, $SelectedSize, $SelectedColor)" disable-output-escaping="yes"/>
I removed the line with the function just to be sure and then everything else works fine. I have no idea what's wrong here. Everything is identical unless by the structure of the url which calls the package:
For the internal package it is: \product\123456
For the custom package it is: \topic\packagename?ProductID=123456
I checked the XML produced by the SPs, the runtime and requested data and it's basically the same in both cases. The ProductID and VariantID values are there. SelectedColor and SelectedSize are not in the XML (not even in the internal package) so it may be just providing null value and probably it's not necessary anyway.
And there is more. If I supress the productid value from the url like this:
\topic\packagename
It won't crash the page (but also won't render because there will be not be any value to process).
In any way I cannot see why it wouldn't work just passing the variable in the querystring (that is basically what it does in the original package even in a different format) and the var value (productid) it getting there. However it seems that it is indeed the url format that is not pleasing the package but it doesn't make too much sense to me. I am over this for several days already and nothing I do seem to produce any positive result. :-(
I looked up online for some documentation but didn't get lucky and didn't find absolutely anything. In extreme cases I try to reach the Vortx support (and they usually answers me giving some valueable clue) but this time it seems that for this specific issue there will not be any help unless I pay an obscene hour fee and unfortunately it's out of question... LoL!
Any idea?
UPDATE: We don't use Multistore regular search tool. Due to the nature of our products (recycled car parts) we have a custom search tool that will try to find 'similar' items that MAY fit the user needs when we don't have the EXACT part. I don't know if you are ware of but several mechanical car parts are interchangeable among different models and makes (like alternators, AC compressors, battery, suspension, cooling system, etc), so when one of our customers needs a part to fix his car he won't tell us the part code; instead he will tell us the car model, year, and generic name of the part so we will try to find the part for him. It does mean that a certain Corolla part will fit perfectly in a Honda Accord and so on. Some times we have some parts in stock that MAY fit his car but we are not absolutely sure. When it happens we will show those parts for the customer and he will decide if he can take his chances. For the sake of customer comfort we want to show all these parts in the same page, but since they normally are variants of different products we cannot use the regular product page for this purpose (because the product page will only show variants of ONE product at time). For this reason I am going to write a package - a modified version of the product page - that will do that but I am struggling with the AddtoCartForm function. In fact I JUST found a workaround by adding the item to the cart accessing directly the /shoppingcart/addtocart script and now my problem is being to force it return to a specific url after to add the item to the shopping cart...
The error has to do with the topic token able to properly get html helper filled out.
I do question why testing is being done on a topic. To test a new product xmlpackage I normally change change the xmlpackage for just one product in a testing environment.
If chaning the product xmlpackage isn't possible then I suggest using the XmlPackageController/engine instead. Which is documented on page https://help.aspdotnetstorefront.com/1000/xml_packages.htm under the heading of "Invoking XML Packages by Themselves". If using the XmlPackageController make certain that the allowengine attribute is set to true in the xmlpackage otherwise that will throw an error as well.
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I am building an Angular test preparation app (with Laravel 5.1 API). One of the requirements is to allow the user to print a certificate of achievement.
The client wants the person's name and credentials interpolated into the document (e.g., highlighted below). Here is a snapshot of the PDF template they sent:
The way I'm handling PDF viewing is simply by storing the file on S3 and giving them a link to that file.
Interpolating information into a PDF doc doesn't seem trivial and I haven't found much information on programmatically allowing this, but there are tools like DocHub, that allow you do edit while viewing the PDF.
I'm interested in learning:
is doing this programmatically trivial?
are there 3rd party tools I'm unaware of?
would I even be able to send this information along to the S3 link to interpolate in the first place?
Using PDF as a format for editing is usually a bad choice. If you have a form with fixed fields, then it's easy. Create a PDF template with an interactive form. In this form, based on AcroForm technology, you'll define fields with fixed coordinates, and a fixed size. You can then add content to these fields.
One major disadvantage with this approach is the lack of flexibility. Did you notice that I used the word "fixed" three times in the previous paragraph? If text doesn't fit the predefined field, you're out of luck. If the field is overdimensioned, you'll end up with plenty of white space. This approach is great if you can predict what the data will be like. A typical use case is a ticket or a voucher. For instance: the empty form is a really nice page, with only a couple of fields where an automated system can put a name, a date, a time, and a seat number.
This isn't the best approach for the example you show in your screen shot. The position of every line of text, every word, every character is known in advance. If you want to replace a short word with a long word (or vice-versa), then all those positions (of each line, of the complete page, possibly of the complete document) need to be recalculated. That's madness. Only people with very poor design skills come up with such an idea.
A better idea, is to store the template as HTML. See for instance chapter 5 of iText's pdfHTML tutorial, where we have this snippet of HTML:
<html>
<head>
<title>Invitation to SXSW 2018</title>
</head>
<body>
<u><b>Re: Invitation</b></u>
<br>
<p>Dear <name>SXSW visitor</name>,
we hope you had a great SXSW film festival experience last year.
And we would like to invite you to the next edition of SXSW Film
that takes place from March 9 until March 17, 2018.</p>
<p>Sincerely,<br>
The SXSW crew<br>
<date>August 4, 2017</date></p>
</body>
</html>
Actually, it's not really HTML, because the <name> tag and the <date> tag don't exist in HTML. All HTML processors (browsers as well as pdfHTML) ignore those tags and treat their content as if the tag was a <span>:
It doesn't make much sense to have such tags in the context of pure HTML, but it does make a lot of sense in the case of pdfHTML. With pdfHTMLL, you can configure custom tags, and have a result that looks like the PDFs shown below:
Look at the document for "John Doe" and compare it with the document for "Bruno Lowagie". The name "John Doe" is much shorter than my name, hence more words fit on that first line. The text flows nicely (we could also have chosen to justify the text on both sides). This "flow" is impossible to achieve with your approach, because you will never get a PDF template to reflow nicely.
OK, I get it, you probably say, but what about the practical aspects? You talk about a Java / .Net library, but I am working with Laravel and Angular.js. First, let me tell you that I don't think you'll find any good PDF tools for Laravel or Angular.js, because of the nature of PDF and those development environments (in my opinion, those technologies don't play well together). Regardless of my opinion, this shouldn't be much of a problem for you because you work in an Amazon environment. AWS supports Java, and the Java code needed to get pdfHTML working is minimal. Most of the code samples I wrote for the pdfHTML tutorial are shorter than 15 lines. So why not try Java and pdfHTML?
If you're already using Amazon services, why not use an amazon lambda function, in combination with iText7 (java), to generate the pdf on demand?
That way, you are guaranteed that the pdf is correct, and has nice layout every time.
Generating the pdf can either be done by:
converting HTML,
programmatically creating your entire document,
filling and flattening an XFA form.
I think for your use-case, either option 1 or 2 are the most sustainable.
Stuck at a trivial problem in Grails 3.1.5: Show the fields of a domain object, excluding one of them, including a transient property. Yes, this is my first Grails 3 project after many years with previous versions.
The generated show.gsp contains
<f:display bean="rfaPdffile"/>
This will include a field that may contain megabytes of XML. It should never be shown interactively. The display: false constraint is no longer in the docs, and seems to be silenty ignored.
Next I tried explicitly naming the fields:
<f:with bean="rfaPdffile">
<f:display property='fileName'/>
<f:display property='pageCount'/>
...
</f:with>
This version suprisingly displays the values without any markup whatsoever. Changing display to field,
<f:with bean="rfaPdffile">
<f:field property='fileName'/>
<f:field property='pageCount'/>
...
</f:with>
sort of works, but shows editable values. So does f:all.
In addition I tried adding other attributes to f:display: properties (like in f:table), except (like in f:all). I note in passing that those two attributes have different syntax for similar purposes.
In the Field plugin docs my use case is explicitly mentioned as a design goal. I must have missed something obvious.
My aim is to quickly throw together a prototype gui, postponing the details until later. Clues are greatly appreciated
If I understood you correctly, you want to have all bean properties included in the gsp but the one with the "megabytes of XML" should not be displayed to the user?
If that is the case you can do:
f:with bean="beanName"
f:field property="firstPropertyName"
f:field property="secondPropertyName"
And the one you don't wish to display:
g:hiddenField name="propertyName" value="${beanName.propertyName?}"
f:with
So list all the properties as f:field or f:display and put the one you don't wish to display in a g:hiddenField Grails tag
You can also try:
f:field property="propertyName"
widget-hidden="true"
but the Label is not hidden in this case.
Hope it helps
My own answer: "use the force, read the source". The f:display tag has two rather obvious bugs. I will submit a pull request as soon as I can.
Bugs aside, the documentation does not mention that the plugin may pick up the "scaffold" static property from the domain, if it has one. Its value should be a map. Its "exclude" key may define a list of property names (List of String) to be excluded. This probably works already for the "f:all" tag; bug correction is needed for the "f:display" tag.
My subjective impression is that the fields plugin is in a tight spot. It is intertwined with the Grails architecture, making it sensitive to changes in Grails internals. It is also required by the standard scaffolding plugin, making it very visible. Thus it needs constant attention from maintainers, a position not to be envied. Even now conventions for default constraints seem to have changed somewhere between Grails 3.0.9 and 3.1.7.
Performance of the fields plugin is sensitive to the total number of plugins in the app where it is used. It searches all plugins dynamically for templates.
For the wish list I would prefer stricter tag naming. The main tags should be verbs. There are two main actions, show and edit. For each action there are two main variants, single bean or multiple beans.
My answer is that at present (2 March 2017) there is no answer. I have searched the Net high and low. For the index (list) and create and edit views, the fields plugin works well enough. A certain field can be easily excluded from the create and edit views, relatively easily from the list view (by listing those that should show), and in no way I could find from the show view. This is such a common need that one would suspect it will be addressed soon. Also, easily showing derived values in the show view, like 'total' for an invoice. One can do that by adding an ordered list with a list item showing the value below the generated ordered list of values, but that is kind of a hack.
In some ways, the old way was easier. Yes, it generated long views, but they were generated and didn't have to be done by the programmer - just custom touches here and there.
So, for example in database I have three users: Peter, John and Sara. There is a specific field, in which all three users can write.
Peter writes:
"I like apples"
, after that John appends with
" and I like bananas"
. Now I have field which says
"I like apples and I like bananas"
, so If I would like to display, which part was writen by whom, my approuch would be to create html tags:
The field would be:
<span class="text-sequence-1">I like apples</span><span class="text-sequence-2"> and I like bananas</span>
and then, from database I would pick the sentences by its order and using CSS on hover on display additional content, on each part of hover on.
1st problem. The problem is if, the third user, Sara, comes and
updates the text, which belongs to both original. Which can be
overcome if I allow to edit one by one Johns and Peters tags.
Then I get edited span inside of original spans and could track
which part was edited and how. If I did like this, I would still
face a second problem:
2nd problem. If Sara decides to edit, for example Johns part, a few
times. I would still get nested badly.
I could use something like #number tags instead of spans, so I can track where each edition ends, but then I couldn't apply CSS code to them to color which part belongs to who and apply additional effects on hover, like showing a box, who edited it and when.
Any ideas how could I implement it?
Sorry for my bad english.
Since you are using a database, keep track of the edits in a separate table. For each edit, keep the following fields:
row-ID of this edit (primary key)
the parent row-ID (the row-ID of the "current edit" when the edit was started/confirmed; see below for how to use)
the author that edited things
the time-stamp
an optional short text describing what was changed (for example, "fixed spelling")
When showing the field, you can then display a link to a "history", that would show who edited what when. You can show individual differences between any two versions such as Wikipedia does when you look at the history of a page - there are many libraries to do that, with highlighting and all. This library seems nice, but there are many others, in all sorts of languages.
When someone starts to edit, let them modify the then-current version (highest time-stamp). When they commit their edit (click accept or similar), check again to see that nobody else has changed things while they were editing (the time-stamp of the parent edit is still highest). If someone did change something, show them the difference between your parent-row and the edit, and tell them to fix things before committing (there may be several edits to take into account). This is the "wikipedia way", and it amounts to a sort of lightweight version control (much easier to implement than, say, Git)
Acually I think that this approach is not good. As you noticed you will get alot of nasty nestings.
What if somone edits only one letter?
Instead of that, think about line comparison approach. Like Git does. So compare if first line changed and store each version.( More sophisticated way would be only storing lines that changed and applying changes like git patches.)
I think your way is destined to fail. It's far way too complex and there is no logical comparision method to be used.
John is cool
John is uncool
John is Uncool
John is weak
Think how you would tag those. What if somone deletes piece of text? Edit will not be visible or u will insert an empty tag (which will not be visible)?
Dont tag, compare. Tagging is not what you're looking for i think. Also please see: Text comparison algorithm
I am looking for something very simple. It can use the Selenium IDE recording tool, but it does not allow me to pick what kind of locators I get.
I want to use:
driver.findElement(By.className(str))
to locate things. All I need is something which watches which UI elements on a web page get clicked and writes out the class attributes of those tags.
If I use the Selenium IDE recording (and export to the right type of thing), I get:
#Test
public void testNav() throws Exception {
driver.get(baseUrl + "/");
driver.findElement(By.name("3.1.1.5.1.1")).clear();
driver.findElement(By.name("3.1.1.5.1.1")).sendKeys("dan");
driver.findElement(By.name("3.1.1.5.1.5")).click();
driver.findElement(By.linkText("Products")).click();
driver.findElement(By.linkText("Categories")).click();
driver.findElement(By.linkText("Create a Category")).click();
driver.findElement(By.linkText("Cancel")).click();
driver.findElement(By.linkText("Products")).click();
driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("a.DisplayAdminProductsLink")).click();
driver.findElement(By.linkText("Product1")).click();
There are problems with this. First, it is not give me any By.className() calls. Why? Those first 3 calls will not help me. The framework I am using puts arbitrary things into the name. How can I get it to see the class attribute?
There actually are unique words in the class attribute of all of the above tags. I design my apps so that this is so. Yet it will not use them.
Earlier I asked:
Why is it doing a "driver.findElement().click()"? This is fragile and does not
end up working.
What I need is:
elt = driver.waitFor(By.className("c")); elt.click();
This will work reproducibly.....
I am considering to be removed from the question, as the findElement() code does work. You need to set a general time-out on the driver. It is not very obvious that this can be done, but it can.
So, continuing on....
I can go to the "Options" and change the order of the "Locator Builders" in eclipse. I can put "css" at the top. Then I get:
driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("input[name=\"3.1.1.5.1.1\"]")).clear();
driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("input[name=\"3.1.1.5.1.1\"]")).sendKeys("dan");
driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("input[name=\"3.1.1.5.1.5\"]")).click();
The tags are like:
<input class="form-control LoginUsernameField" ... />
But it does not see the class attribute.... Or I can do this manually.
Selenium looks for a unique identifier to identify elements in a webpage. classNames are a very less desired option for this purpose as they are generally not unique. Ids and names on the other hand are generally unique. This might be the reason why Selenium IDE is not selecting classNames and going for other identifiers.
Selenium IDE records user actions. You would have clicked on the element for Selenium IDE to identify it and that is why you are getting driver.findElement().click().
If you want to wait for element to wait you can try implicit wait.
When you want to use driver.findElement(By.className(str)), are you sure that there is one and only one element in the webpage that is associated with a className? If that is the case you can modify the webdriver code manually to use className.
First time poster here, I'm a designer not skilled at all with php and I have a small issue I don't seem to be able to solve. I'm making a site in drupal 7 using a sub theme on zen.
Btw this is a great CMS, even though people say it's really more a developers CMS. I have no trouble to do what I need using views, rules, display suite etc. So a big thank you for all the developers out there making this such a good CMS. But for this apparently simple problem... no module will help me (I think) and I'm kinda stuck.
So here it is: I'd like to add a subtitle next to the title in all my pages.
So what I did was to add a custom field into the content type basic page (machine name: field_sub_title) which is a simple text field.
I uncommented the following line in my template.php
function mytheme_preprocess_page(&$variables, $hook) {
$variables['sub_title'] = t('field_sub_title');
}
Now my question is how do I load the content of my custom field into that variable?
I know i need to change the second part, but I don't have a clue as into what I need to change this.
Displaying the variable into the the page.tpl.php is something I know about so I only need help with the first part.
{EDIT}
Ok I found how to do this :)
I was looking for a solution in the wrong place. I don't need to change any thing in the template.php file.
Just needed to add this bit of code into my page.tpl.php:
<?php
print $node->field_sub_title['und'][0]['value'];
?>
So I'm posting this here for other Drupal newbies struggling with this....
Your solution may work for now, but there may be a more Drupal-y way to handle a problem like this. If you haven't noticed any problems yet, you may find one or more of the following issues down the road:
Someone who doesn't know php or Drupal theming may need to change the way this works.
If you're like me, you may forget where exactly in code this was implemented.
You may see superfluous markup and/or errors on nodes (content) that do not have this sub-title field (ie. event content not having a sub-title field while basic pages and news articles do).
When you add a field to a content type, it will automatically appear anytime content in that content type is displayed. You should be able to add the sub-title field for your page, event or whatever else you need and have it automatically appear in the markup.
You can 'manage display' of a content type to drag and drop the order for fields to appear. You could take it a step further by using a module like Display Suite to add formatting or layout per-content type.
If you feel like this isn't good enough and the markup for the subtitle must be at the same level as the page title (which is rare), at least add an if statement to make your code check to see if the variable is present before trying to print it. I'd also add a new variable and comments for code readability.
<?php
$subtitle = $node->field_sub_title['und'][0]['value'];
if($subtitle){
print $subtitle;
}
?>
Consider using field_get_items or field_view_value, or at least use the LANGUAGE_NONE constant instead of 'und'
See https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/modules%21field%21field.module/function/field_get_items/7 and https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/modules!field!field.module/function/field_view_value/7
This has the added benefit of reducing the number of potential security holes you create.